
Book • r 3 .3 




BOOK 



THE FAITH OF CENTURIES. 



THE 

FAITH OF CENTURIES 

u 
ADDRESSES AND ESSAYS 

ON SUBJECTS CONNECTED WITH 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



"We cannot remind ourselves too often or too seriously 
that the questions which are so freely discussed among us 
now, and are forced upon us with increasing reach of aim 
and urgency of argument, are questions of life and death 
to human hope." — Dean Church. 



SECOND EDITION. 



NEW YORK : 

THOMAS VVHITTAKER, 
2 & 3, Bible House. 









B y Transfer 
0« C. Public Library 
DEC 2 2 1938 



WITHDRAWN" 

70885 




TT is a commonplace to speak of the mental rest- 
-*- . lessness of the present age. Whether, as we 
are sometimes tempted to assume, that restlessness 
is greater than it has been at many past periods 
of our social history may perhaps be questioned. 
Each age is apt to exaggerate its own difficulties 
and troubles, and our present religious difficulties 
and troubles doubtless loom larger in our eyes than 
they will appear to our children's children to have 
really been. At the same time there can be no 
question that doubt and inquiry and a deep-seated 
anxiety about the religious doctrines which have 
been handed down to us are not the least prominent 
characteristics of our generation. The times are 
not indeed positively infidel. Quite apart from the 
wide field which Christianity can claim as her own 
undisputed possession, there is no great amount of 



vi Preface. 

unqualified repudiation of Christian teaching. This 
age, even when it is not convinced that Christi- 
anity is true, is generally willing to regard it as at 
any rate a subject for investigation. But it is an 
investigation about which many minds are uneasy. 
There is no fierce hurricane of disbelief, but there 
is movement on the surface of the waters. Nor 
is that movement confined to one particular spot. 
The spread of intelligence resulting from our 
universal education, and the remarkable cheapness 
of modern literature, have opened the doors of 
religious inquiry to all classes. The clerk in the 
counting-house, or the mechanic in the workshop, 
or the pitman digging coal, may each know and 
feel something of the pressure of religious problems. 
Such a circumstance is not necessarily a matter for 
regret. Doubt as often as not issues in an increase 
of faith. The discipline of struggle bears here, as 
elsewhere, its good fruit. Nor is the battle with 
adverse modes of thought, adverse interpretations of 
Christian doctrine and history, one that in the long- 
run " nought availeth." Calvary is not to be regarded 
as typical of the world's final judgment on Christ. 
Harder contests have before now been fought and 
won. Our Lord's question, " When the Son of Man 



Preface. vii 

cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?" does 
indeed suggest the possibility of failure, and forbid 
any belief in mechanical success ; but it is at least a 
question left open. It is impossible to suppose that 
He who bade us pray for the perfecting of human 
obedience, for a kingdom on earth in which the 
Divine will should be done " as it is in heaven," has 
by some terrible decree ordained that that prayer 
shall of necessity fail to find an answer — that the 
coming years shall bring in, not an era of perfect 
faith, but a time of almost universal denial and 
rejection. The gift of the Holy Spirit was made 
that the world as well as the Church — the world 
through the Church— should be guided into " all the 
truth " ; not that the greatness of our failure should 
be made the more apparent, and the tragedy of 
human history be deepened beyond describing. 
Doubtless there is an urgent call upon our zeal, our 
persistence, our earnestness, our ability ; but it is not 
one to which we need respond as to some summons 
to a forlorn hope. We are called on to strive, only 
not with the mad despair of a doomed army, but 
with the calm courage of those whose hearts antici- 
pate victory — not as pessimists, but as Christians. 
This volume had its origin in an attempt to help 



viii Preface. 

those who may be spoken of as, not only socially, but 
educationally, members of the middle class to con- 
front some of the more common difficulties of belief, 
and at the same time to realise with less insufficiency 
and inadequacy the nature of Christian doctrine. It 
may thus do something, perhaps, to fill up what 
seems a gap in our apologetic literature. The book 
was originally intended to consist of a selection 
of addresses from a series which one of the con- 
tributors had arranged at an East London church. 
A certain number of these addresses were given, 
but circumstances prevented the series from being 
finished. It was, however, desired to bring out 
the book, and various essays were therefore con- 
tributed in place of the missing addresses. It is 
only reasonable to ask that the volume should be 
judged by what it aspires to be, and not by a 
standard to which it makes no pretension. There 
is here no attempt to add to the theological thought 
or the religious scholarship of the day. There is 
no more than an attempt to put in a plain and 
straightforward way, before a particular type of mind, 
some of the reasons why the writers themselves 
adhere to the Christian creed, and still interpret the 
lights and shadows of life by it, and still claim for it 



Preface. ix 

men's entire loyalty, and still urge them to " amend 
their lives," in accordance with its precepts, its warn- 
ings, its promises. The book is not written in the 
interests of a party, but of the Church as a whole. 
Indeed, it will be observed that the contributors 
are by no means drawn from one school of thought 
alone. It ought perhaps to be added that each writer 
is responsible only for his own contribution, although 
there cannot in the nature of things be any very 
wide divergence of opinion among Christians upon 
the topics selected for treatment. 

If this brief and halting discussion of them — a 
discussion by men who feel that they speak but with 
"stammering lips" and see but with half-opened 
eyes — shall do anything to help any of those who 
may read it to remain true to "the faith of cen- 
turies," then the purpose of this little work will 
have been abundantly fulfilled. 

W. E. Bowen. 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE PAGE 

I. FAITH IN GOD I 

By the Rev. A. Chandler, M.A., Rector of Poplar, 

II. THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD . . . .24 

By the Rev. S. A. Alexander, Reader of the Temple. 

III. FAITH IN IMMORTALITY . . . . -37 

By the Rev. T. B. Strong, M.A., Student and Tutor 
of Christ Church, Oxford. 

IV. AND V. FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST . . . 60 

By the Rev. H. Scott Holland, M.A., Canon of 
St. PaaFs. 

VI. THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST .... 105 

By the Rev. the Hon. W. E. Bowen, M.A. 

VII. THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 

AS AN HISTORIC FACT . . . . 145 

By the Rev. H. E. Ryle, D.D., President of Queen's 
College, Cambridge, and Hulsean Professor of Divinity 
at Cambridge. 

VIII. SIN 171 

By the Rev. R. B. Girdlestone, M.A., Honorary 
Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. 

IX. ATONEMENT . 1 84 

By the Rev. R. B. Girdlestone, M.A., Honorary 
Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. 



xii Contents. 

LECTURE PAGE 

X. TEMPTATION . • . • • . . 205 

By the Rev. W. C. E. Newbolt, M.A., Canon of 
St. Paul's. 

XI. THE PUNISHMENT OF SIN 227 

By the Rev. W. C. E. Newbolt, M.A., Canon of 
St. Paul's. 

XII. THE PREPARATION IN HISTORY FOR CHRIST . 248 

By the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Rochester, 
D.D. 

XIII. CHRIST IN HISTORY 268 

By the Right Rev. Alfred Barry, D.D., D.C.L., 

Late Bishop of Sydney and Primate of Australia 
and Tasmania. 

XIV. NATURE AND MIRACLE 29 T 

By the Rev. T. G. Bonney, D.Sc., LL.D., Ho?iorary 
Canon oj Manchester, and Professor of Geology, 
University College, Lotidon. 

XV. THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN . . . . 31 I 

By the Ven. the Archdeacon of London, D.D. 

XVI. HEAVEN 333 

By the Rev. J. E. C. Welldon, M.A., Head Master 
of Harrow School. 



THE FAITH OF CENTURIES. 



Ifaitb in <5o&, 

FAITH in God — is it a possible and reasonable 
thing? does its possession exalt a man or 
degrade him ? is it something to be proud of, or 
something to be ashamed of? These are the ques- 
tions which press upon a thinking man in an age of 
" progress " and " enlightenment." It may be easier 
to arrive at an answer, if for the moment we leave 
out the words in God, and ask what faith means in 
N itself, and whether faith is not necessary to all that 
we think best worth knowing or doing. I think we 
shall see (i) that man walks by faith in all that 
makes him most truly man, and that the more faith 
he has the further he goes in the way of knowledge 
and achievement ; and (2) that this faith must rest 
on a belief in God, if in the long-run it is to overcome 
many trials and one great paradox, and if human 
life is to be regarded as a rational and satisfactory 

X 



2 The Faith of Centuries. 

thing. Faith I would define, then, as belief in order 
and system — a belief, in other words, that the world 
of nature and of man is not a mere chaos of conflicting 
facts, unrelated and irreconcilable, but that there is 
an intelligible plan underlying it, a network of in- 
telligible principles weaving it into a coherent whole. 
'Now, if this plan were fully grasped in all its details 
and subdivisions, if these principles were fully worked 
out in all their minutest applications, faith would no 
longer be required ; absolute knowledge would have 
been achieved. Faith, then, presents us with ideals 
of truth : knowledge is the realisation of these ideals. 
Take a simple instance. We see a child playing with 
" blocks," square bits of wood, each painted with a 
fragment of something, a head of a man, a door of 
a house, a trunk of a tree, etc. He places them 
together in faith — that is, in the belief that there is 
some plan by which they can be connected into a 
satisfactory picture. In themselves they are mean- 
ingless and ridiculous ; but he works on with the 
conviction that they must fit in somehow. This 
conviction is inspired by faith, and realised in the 
picture which results at last. In this case, as in 
others, " faith is the substance of things hoped for, 
the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. xi. i). 
When the hope is fulfilled, and the things are seen, 
knowledge takes the place of faith. Here, then, two 
truths would seem to emerge: (i) that faith, far 
from being irrational, is itself the source from which 
all rational inquiry springs ; and (2) that faith is 
temporary, stimulating effort, and superseded by 



Faith in God. 3 

achievement All science has its roots in faith. 
Without faith, men would have rested content with 
the bare "facts" reported by the various senses; 
but faith insists that they shall be made subject 
to law and explanation, and hence comes science. 
Faith, then, must not be contrasted with reason, 
since it is rational to the core. It may profitably 
be contrasted with knowledge, as the process is 
contrasted with the result. Faith is the rational 
pursuit of truth ; knowledge, the rational attain- 
ment of truth. 

And so, as we look at the great men of science, we 
see that faith is the very breath of their life. They 
believe that there is some great rational law which 
connects and explains what are now mere disjointed 
items of truth. Their ideas as to the nature of that 
law are crude and unsatisfactory at first. Their 
theory will not work ; it does not explain things ; the 
facts reject it ; the tight-shut doors of truth do not 
fly open at their talisman. But they do not despair ; 
their faith does not fail : they recast their hypothesis, 
modify, alter, enrich it. Again and again they 
manipulate their blocks with a clearer and more 
luminous picture before them, until at last the 
stubborn facts group and relate themselves ; the ideal 
of the mind is realised before the eyes ; the magic 
formula which induces order has been pronounced 
and faith has given birth to new knowledge. Thus, 
Darwin believed in the kinship and common origin 
of species now quite separate and distinct, and set 
himself to find the law of their derivation. If their 



4 The Faith of Centuries. 

parentage was the same, how is it that the members 
of the family diverge so widely in after-ages? 
" Variation through natural selection " is the answer, 
the hypothesis of faith, which by vast and patient 
labour is shown to fit and explain the most alien 
and discordant facts. It was only by unconquerable 
faith in system and order, and in the ultimate con- 
nectedness of things, that the greatest discovery of 
our age was won. 

Or we turn to practical life, and watch the 
philanthropist and the social reformer. Both are 
occupied with "the substance of things hoped for." 
The philanthropist has before his mind a glowing 
picture of man's nature as it might be, pure and 
upright and unselfish ; and inspired by that, he sets 
to work upon his " facts," the men and women so 
unideal at present, in whose lives that picture has 
got to be reproduced. Again and again the facts 
reject him, defy him, laugh at him. He thought they 
would understand that he was sent to work their 
deliverance, but they understand it not. But at last, 
if his faith holds out, it proves and substantiates 
itself. In the soul of at least some of his subjects 
calm succeeds to storm ; wild thoughts, incoherent 
impulses, passionate desires, come together and find 
their place ; the unity of a man's nature asserts itself ; 
the outlines of a ground-plan grow visible ; the ideal 
picture of an orderly human life is reproduced on 
the fleshy tablets of the heart. 

So, too, the reformer sees visions of a perfect 
state, in which law is the free expression of an 



Faith in God. 5 

enlightened people's will, in which class and wealth 
erect no barriers between a man and his fellows, in 
which equal opportunities are offered to all who have 
the wit to use them. It is by faith that he discerns 
the outlines of that perfect city, and by faith that he 
tries to build it upon earth. Habit, prejudice, and 
interest are all against him. The stones that he 
handles are alive, and delight to thwart his efforts 
to fit them into their place. It will be much if at the 
end he has built some portion of a single wall after 
the pattern hid in his soul. 

In each of these instances — the student, the philan- 
thropist, the reformer — faith is the source of effort ; 
and in each, as we have seen, faith has its trials, its 
temptations to yield to scepticism and despair. But 
there is something more. In each there is a cruel 
paradox — an insulting contrast between the greatness 
of the infinite ideals and the shortness of the finite 
life. 

The man of science has trained his faculties of 
observation and inference to their highest perfection, 
and is in the triumphant pursuit of truth, when some 
miserable bodily ailment strikes him down ; the 
bright ideals, on which he had laid his grasp, begin 
to fade ; their outlines grow blurred and confused ; 
a fitful flame lights up fragments of the picture, only 
to distort the whole ; then it too flickers away ; black 
darkness settles down, and all is gone. 

So, too, the man of action is working out his 
schemes for the reform of individuals or of society. 
" Give me ten years more," he says, " and my ideals 



6 The Faith of Centuries. 

will be firmly built on solid ground " ; and suddenly 
the overwrought nature gives way and snaps. The 
scheme was his, the offspring of his faith and love. 
Others do not understand it ; and when he is gone, 
there will be no one to carry on the work. Albert 
Diirer, in one of his greatest pictures, shows us the 
" melancholy " which springs from this awful contrast 
between the infinite eternal ideals of truth and 
goodness which man's faith conceives, and the 
ludicrous smallness and uncertainty of the achieve- 
ment that results. 

This is the great paradox of faith — a paradox 
which is only overcome when faith in truth and 
goodness has become also faith in God. In fact, if 
I were asked how I justify belief in God, I should 
answer that I believe in God in order that I may be 
able to believe, fully and unreservedly, in the eternal 
reality of truth and goodness. With faith in God, 
the difficulty vanishes. Truth and goodness are 
infinite and eternal. Why ? Because they are not 
mere abstractions which appear and pass away, but 
attributes of the nature of God Himself. Man is able 
to grasp these infinite ideals. How? Inasmuch as 
he is made in God's image and can share in God's 
life. If so, they belong to him for ever, and the 
glimpses which he has of them in this life are to be 
followed by a steady contemplation of them else- 
where in the nature of God, to whose character they 
belong. Thus, heaven rounds off and completes the 
work, apparently so futile and fragmentary, begun on 
earth. 



Faith in God. 7 

Others mistrust, and say, " But time escapes : 

Live now or never ! " 
He said, ' ' What's time ? Leave Now for dogs and apes ! 

Man has For Ever ! " 
• * 

Was it not great ? Did not he throw on God 

(He loves the burthen) 
God's task to make the heavenly period 

Perfect the earthen ? 
He ventured neck or nothing— heaven's success 

Found, or earth's failure : 
Wilt thou trust death or not? He answered, " Yes I 

Hence with life's pale lure ! " 
That low man seeks a little thing to do, 

Sees it and does it : 
This high man, with a great thing to pursue, 

Dies ere he knows it : 
That low man goes on adding one to one, 

His hundred's soon hit : 
This high man, aiming at a million, 

Misses an unit. 
That, has the world here — should he need the next, 

Let the world mind him ! 
This, throws Himself on God, and unperplexed, 

Seeking, shall find Him.* 

But is this more than a poetical fancy ? I answer, 
that faith in God is only the logical outcome and 
completion of the faith of which we are conscious in 
our efforts after knowledge and goodness. 

Faith presents itself as the obstinate instinctive 
pursuit of order and system and completeness in 
human life ; and faith is tested and verified by its 
ability to attain them, by its power to accomplish 
the work which it sets itself to do. Why have people 
in every age believed in God ? Because of problems 

* Browning, The Grammarian's Funeral. 



8 The Faith of Centuries. 

in their life which demanded a solution — problems 
which must, unsolved, have driven them to madness 
or despair, and of which the only solution was to be 
found in the existence of an eternal and personal 
God. Thus, from the side of man we may say (with all 
reverence) that God represents a great hypothesis, set 
up in order to explain what would otherwise be inex- 
plicable, to introduce peace, harmony, and order into a 
life which must otherwise be discordant and chaotic. 

The first great problem was : Is there a Divine 
Being who is Himself the source from which truth 
and goodness flow, and in which they eternally exist ? 

A second : Can we stand in any real living re- 
lation to such a Being ? 

A third : How, assuming such a relation to be 
possible, are we brought into it, and maintained in it ? 

How does a Christian's faith in God answer these 
questions and satisfy these aspirations ? First, then, 
faith in God guarantees the reality and eternity of 
human truth and goodness. For if faith in these 
stop short of belief in God, it is a disastrous failure. 
For then the old paradox remains. Then there is 
no order or completeness about man ; his whole life 
becomes an illusion and a mockery ; he is condemned 
to passing glimpses of an ideal which he can never 
really grasp or understand. 

He weaves, and is clothed with derision ; 

Sows, and he shall not reap ; 
His life is a watch or a vision 

Between a sleep and a sleep.* 



* Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon. 



Faith in God. 9 

In that case faith, which aimed at bringing order 
and completeness into our mental outlook, will have 
failed disastrously in its work, It will have fired 
us with aspirations after a world to which we are 
hopelessly unable to attain. Whilst unfolding its 
great ideals of knowledge and love, it was all the 
time teaching us to seek after the Infinite ; and now 
it turns round and tells us that the Infinite is an 
empty dream. A faith which does that, destroys 
itself and discredits its own previous achievements. 
The fact is that faith cannot for ever be poised in 
mid-air. It must either soar to God or flutter 
down into the mire. If there be no God in whom 
our ideal of truth lives and has its being, how 
can we be sure that there is any ultimate order and 
connectedness of things ? or even that our knowledge 
represents reality at all ? May it not be essentially 
fragmentary and relative? And, again, if there be 
no God to sustain and purify our wills, is unselfishness 
really possible at all ? Can we really work for others 
in any true sense? Are we not always acting for 
ourselves, the gratification of our pride, the triumph 
of some hobby of our own ? In other words, agnostic- 
ism and indifference are contagious diseases. They 
cannot be confined in a sort of isolation ward, and 
strictly limited to the destruction of men's belief in 
religion. Rather, the infection spreads, and he who 
disbelieves in God tends to become a sceptic as to 
knowledge, and a cold critic of philanthropy. 

Of course, it will be objected that there are a 
number of people who are agnostics in religion, 



io The Faith of Centuries. 

and yet who believe in truth and try to do good ! 
Certainly there are. But the question is, not only 
whether such a position is logically tenable, but also 
whether it is likely to endure — whether, when the 
influence of religion (felt, but not acknowledged) has 
passed away, it will be able to withstand the pressure 
of such scepticism as I have described. Certainly in 
the life and literature of to-day we seem to see that 
this scepticism is not satisfied with religion, but aims 
equally at the destruction of all ideals. With the 
denial of God, true knowledge and moral responsi- 
bility are apt to be abolished ; bare sensations and 
appetites take their place. But for ourselves, we 
refuse to believe that faith must be driven to this 
act of suicide. We believe that there is a real truth 
to be pursued and a real goodness to be achieved, 
because both truth and goodness exist in real sub- 
stantial perfection in an eternal, personal God. 

But this answer itself raises a second and deeper 
problem. Assuming that there is a God, what is 
our relation or attitude to Him ? How can we 
receive His gifts ? how can we regard heaven as our 
natural home? how can there be any affinity at all 
between Him and us ? The matter would be com- 
paratively simple, if we could regard ourselves as 
mere impersonal channels through which God is 
making a continuous revelation of Himself, so that 
our thoughts and acts are simply and literally the 
thoughts and acts of God. But we cannot accept 
that theory. Perhaps the thing of which we are 
most entirely certain concerning ourselves is, that 



Faith in God. 1 1 

we have a distinct personality of our own. We may 
seek after God, but are certainly not part and parcel 
of God. All the facts of the religious life — its 
struggles, prayers, and aspirations, its tempests of 
love and humility and remorse, together with the 
convictions underlying such words as " sacrifice/' 
" mediation," " redemption " — are all a proof of this. 
The human spirit is deeply aware of two facts — first, 
that in the nature of things it is necessarily distinct 
from the Divine Spirit, and, secondly, that i>y its 
own fault it has been unnecessarily alienated from 
Him ; and what it aspires after is, not absorption 
in God, but sonship to God. 

But how can that be? If we are separate from 
God, can we find any other relation to Him than the 
savage's — of blind terror and grovelling superstition ? 
Can we, without forfeiting our own individuality, 
share in the life of God now, so that the fulness 
of truth and goodness (which are that life) may be 
enjoyed by us in heaven ? The Christian's answer 
is this : — Truth and goodness, as they exist perfectly 
in the nature of God Himself, became incarnate in 
Jesus Christ, and are there brought within the grasp 
of man. Christ is " the wisdom," " the word," " the 
express image " of the Father ; in union with Christ 
we gain the assurance that our knowledge is not 
merely relative and misleading, but expresses the 
truth as it is in God. 

Moreover, the " love of God " was manifested in 
Christ, and, through union with Christ, makes real 
unselfishness possible for us. In a word, the Christian 



12 The Faith of Centuries. 

doctrine is, that in himself man could have no other 
relation to God than the one I have mentioned, — 
of blind terror flowing from a consciousness of sin, 
and of ignorant superstition which such terror must 
produce ; but that the Son of God was revealed 
in the flesh, to save him from sin, and give him 
the adoption of a son. Thus faith in Christ 
harmonises and ennobles human existence. It makes 
it possible for men to look up and say, " Our 
Father which art in heaven " : love and confidence 
take the place of terror and distrust ; peace and order 
are restored ; eternal life is no longer a thing hoped 
for in another world, but a present possession, a gift 
already received in and through the knowledge of 
the Father and the Son. " This is the record, that 
God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in 
His Son" (i John v. u). "This is life eternal, that 
they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus 
Christ, whom Thou hast sent" (John xvii. 3). Thus, 
in the Christian revelation, heaven and earth are 
brought very near to each other ; and men may well 
be content to wait for the perfect consummation of 
goodness and truth in heaven, when on earth they 
stand in close communion with Him who is the perfect 
expression of them both. 

And, thirdly, how can each individual enter that 
union with the Son of God ? It is nearly nineteen 
hundred years since Christ lived on earth, and since 
He returned to heaven. How can that eternal life 
which He brought about be communicated to us so 
long afterwards? The answer is, Through the opera- 



Faith in God. 13 

tion of the Holy Ghost, perpetuating the work of 
Christ. By virtue of the Incarnation, all material things 
are transformed, exalted, and turned into channels for 
the transmission of grace. Human agency is used 
for Divine ends in the ordained ministry of the 
Church : water is sanctified to the mystical washing 
away of sin ; bread and wine are consecrated to 
become the Body and Blood of the Lord. The 
Sacraments are presented to us as the special means 
by which the Holy Ghost claims and dedicates each 
individual ; applies to each the merits of Christ's 
atonement ; strengthens them in loyalty to Him ; 
brings them back to Him when they have wandered 
away ; feeds them with the Bread of Life and the 
Cup of Salvation, " making Jesus present still " to 
each successive generation. 

In this way the Christian faith explains and 
harmonises our life, by connecting it with the life of 
God through the three great laws of Dependence, 
Restoration, and Renewal : the dependence of 
creatures on the wisdom and love of their Maker ; 
the restoration of the race through the atoning work 
of Christ ; the renewal of the individual through an 
indwelling, purifying Presence. 

English Church people are thus able to say, with 
a full appreciation of the meaning of the words : 
" First, I believe in God the Father, who hath made 
me and all the world ; secondly, in God the Son, who 
hath redeemed me and all mankind ; thirdly, in God 
the Holy Ghost, who sanctifieth me and all the elect 
people of God." 



14 The Faith of Centuries. 

The language which I have used in the last few 
paragraphs has been largely religious ; and, in spite 
of everything, people will say, " Yes, that's all very 
well for people who have got a ready-made belief in 
Christianity and the Church and the Catechism and 
all that ; but it's got nothing to do with those problems 
of knowledge and goodness which you started with." 
Now this assumption that faith in God has no bearing 
on scientific and moral effort is precisely the theory 
against which I am protesting. How terribly familiar 
it is ! People keep one pigeon-hole of their mind 
reserved for "religious feeling," as expressed often in 
highly sensational hymns ; another is devoted to 
" secular knowledge " ; and there is no communication 
between the two. The result is that religion is taken 
to consist in mere sentiment, irrational and often 
overdrawn sentiment, and " faith " is regarded as a 
cant term for unreasoning belief. In opposition to 
that view, I have tried to point out faith laying the 
very foundations of secular science ; I have tried to 
show that without faith, as " the substance of things 
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," know- 
ledge could never have advanced a single step ; 
and that faith in God is only a higher phase of 
that very same faith which is at work in other 
spheres of knowledge. In a word, faith first produces 
knowledge, and, in the practical life, philanthropy ; 
and then rises to God, in order to guarantee their 
reality. So far from faith being opposed to know- 
ledge and confined to religion, faith is really the 
bond which unites knowledge and religion together, 



Faith in God. 15 

as different aspects of one great rational effort after 
truth. 

And so the theological doctrines which I touched 
upon just now have a profound connection with the 
problems of ordinary knowledge. They give us, 
expressed in terms of religion, certain principles 
which are necessary to any system of truth that is to 
be really coherent and satisfactory. What qualities 
are implied in the word " truth," if it is to be worthy 
of the name? Two emerge into view at once. If 
truth is to have any meaning for us, it must be in 
some relation to us ; it must be capable of being 
grasped by our human faculties, pictured by our 
imagination, systematised by our reason. Truth 
must be a possible object of experience to human 
minds. That is obvious. But, then, we find that the 
human mind does not receive items of truth ready- 
made, but gradually arrives at them by elaborate 
processes of inference and comparison, whereby bare 
sensations are worked up into intelligible facts. These 
complicated mental processes are the machinery by 
which the raw material is transformed into manufac- 
tured items of knowledge. But what of this knowledge 
itself? A horrible suspicion makes itself felt that 
these mental operations which gradually produce 
knowledge also gradually remove it further and 
further from reality. The world of reality sends us 
certain messages in the form of sensations ; but these 
sensations are so dressed up and tricked out and 
transfigured by the mind that perhaps their own 
mother would not know them. In that case the 



1 6 The Faith of Centuries. 

whole vaunted system of our knowledge will be 
exactly like a dream. For a dream, too, takes its 
cue from memories of the waking world, but distorts 
and garbles them into ludicrous parodies of fact. No 
doubt the system of knowledge which our reason 
builds up out of sensations of colour and sound and 
touch is a wonderful and elaborate creation ; but what 
is its relation to reality ? This is a question which 
we are bound to face, and it is one which is causing 
much perplexity to thinking men. The fact is, that 
in some way or other, if truth is to be real and solid, 
it must not only be our truth, but also the truth — 
not only true relatively to us and to our faculties 
and capacities, but absolutely true, true in itself, 
as well. 

Now a Christian believes that the truth, real and 
absolute and eternal, exists in the nature of God ; 
and he believes also that in the person of Christ 
a human mind and a human will were united to 
the Godhead. In this union he finds a proof and 
guarantee of the trustworthiness and reality of human 
knowledge. No doubt there is a difference of method. 
Man learns, and God knows. Man acquires know- 
ledge in a painful and piecemeal fashion ; God enjoys 
the restful "contemplation of all time and all exist- 
ence." But still if Christ could submit to the 
limitations of a human reason without ceasing to be 
God, the measure of knowledge attained by human 
reason must itself be real and genuine and authentic. 
Here, as elsewhere, the Incarnation ratifies and con- 
firms man's efforts, and reveals to us that, in his 



Faith in God. \j 

capacity for knowledge, as well as in his capacity 
for goodness, he is made in the image of God Himself. 
It teaches us that man's mind, with all its com- 
plicated machinery, comes from God, who created it 
as an instrument for attaining truth ; that it was used 
by God, in the person of Jesus Christ ; and that, 
therefore, its work is trustworthy and can be accepted 
without misgiving as a genuine picture of reality. In 
this way Christianity gives us the assurance that our 
system of truth, that world of knowledge so laboriously 
built up, is also a portion of the truth as it exists in 
eternal and absolute completeness before the mind 
of God. 

Or take the other department of truth, practical 
truth, truth expressed in moral character ; here, too, 
Christian doctrine establishes and ratifies human 
effort. We all know what a poor, dry, starchy thing 
philanthropy is apt to become ; how narrow and 
partial we are in our own human sympathy; how 
hard it is to keep straight ourselves, quite apart from 
straightening others. And so we are inclined to ask 
whether there is after all anything in the nature of 
things that corresponds to this " struggling, tasked 
morality " of ours ; or whether it is not a law of the 
universe that every one should think only of himself, 
act for himself, and " make no neighbours." And 
Christianity answers that the highest law of the 
universe is not the law of self-preservation at all, but 
the law of love ; that love is older than creation ; that 
the eternal love of the Father for the Son is continued 
in the love of the Son for men, and is the measure 

2 



1 8 The Faith of Centuries. 

of the duty of man to man. " God so loved the 
world, that He gave His only begotten Son " (John 
iii. 1 6). "Thou lovedst Me before the foundation of 
the world" (John xvii. 24). "As the Father hath 
loved Me, so have I loved you" (John xv. 9). "If 
God so loved us, we ought also to love one another M 
(1 John iv. 11). How these words strengthen and 
encourage us in our morality ! How abundantly 
they justify our poor efforts after " altruism " and 
self-denial, by showing that these qualities, of which 
we were growing half ashamed, belong to the char- 
acter of the "Author of nature" Himself. 

Yes, and the revelation of love not only justifies 
duty, but glorifies it too. 

Duty ! how the word smacks of board-rooms and 
committee-rooms and " case-papers " and superior 
people ! But the Gospel of Love makes us see, not 
cases, but men and women, endowed with the splendid 
capacities and the awful responsibilities of a spiritual 
life — men and women who, in virtue alike of their 
grandeur and of their perils, have an inalienable claim 
on our sympathy and help. 

Christianity thus strengthens enormously our con- 
fidence in human knowledge and human goodness, 
by teaching us that they truly represent the wisdom 
and love of God. And the faith which accepts 
that Christian teaching is the same faith which 
started as a vague instinctive sense that goodness 
and truth, somehow or other, existed. That early 
faith was building an altar to an "unknown God," 
and in Christianity finds that God declared and 



Faith in God. 19 

manifested as the source of all that it prized and 
pursued. 

Moreover, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity goes 
a step further, and insists that the whole of man's 
nature, in its complex unity, is an image of the God- 
head. Each of us is a trinity in unity. For each 
consists, first, of reason ; secondly, of passion or 
desire ; thirdly, of a will, which is not the same as 
either, but partakes of the nature of each, and is 
the bond of union between the two. Each of these 
elements of our nature is entirely distinct from the 
others. We cannot possibly reduce reason to a mode 
of desire, or regard passion as a sort of reason. Reason 
leads us to knowledge ; passion prompts us to action. 
And yet, distinct as they are, each requires the other. 
Without an element of passion, a devoted love of 
truth, reason will never do its work, but will remain 
a mere undeveloped capacity for knowledge. And 
an admixture of reason is necessary, if the object of 
desire is to be clearly conceived and steadily pursued. 
And at the same time the will is present in both, and 
gives strength to both, uniting them together as com- 
plementary expressions of one great effort of self- 
development. Thus man is both three and one. His 
personality comprises three distinct elements without 
ceasing to be an unity. And, oppressed by this 
mystery of his nature, he turns to religion and finds 
that God, too, is Three in One. There is a Father 
whose thoughts are mirrored in an eternal Word, 
who was with Him in the beginning, and is the 
express image of His nature (John i. 1 ; Heb. i. 3). 



20 The Faith of Centuries. 

Father and Son are distinct, but inseparably united; 
so that where the Son works, there the Father is 
working too, and every one who has seen the Son 
has seen the Father also. The Son is begotten of 
the Father, as the thought is begotten of the thinker ; 
but having a distinct personal life of His own, ex- 
presses His Sonship in filial love. The life of the 
Father issues out as Thought, and returns to Him 
as Love. And there is the Holy Ghost, who " pro- 
ceeds " or comes forth from the fount of the Godhead, 
and is the life-giving, creative power, who gives effect 
to the wisdom and love of the Father and the Son. 
When the Father planned creation, it was the Spirit 
who moved on the face of the waters, and fashioned 
the order and harmony and beauty of the world. 
When the Son yearned to restore the lost creation, it 
was by the operation of the Holy Ghost that He was 
made man of the substance of the Virgin Mary, His 
mother. And when the grace of the Incarnation is 
to be offered to successive generations, so that by it 
they may come to the Father by the Son, it is the 
Holy Ghost who brings the means of grace. Thus 
the Creator Spirit, the active personal Will, is the bond 
of union between the Father and the Son, whose 
gracious purposes He brings to pass. The Trinity of 
the Godhead, then, unfathomably mysterious as it is, 
has its counterpart in the trinity of our manhood. 
Our trinity consists of three faculties in one human 
person ; the Trinity of God consists of three Persons 
in one Divine Nature. And the doctrine thus justified 
and illustrated by our manhood has a practical lesson 



Faith in God. 21 

for us. It teaches us the ideal harmony which should 
prevail amongst all the elements of our nature ; reason 
and desire, knowledge and action, contemplation and 
philanthropy, are not to be aliens and rivals, but 
friends and partners, belonging to one another, and 
working together in the unity of a sanctified and 
spiritual will. 

What has been said may help us to see that faith 
in God verifies itself by its intimate correspondence 
with the needs of men, the explicit answer which 
it makes to the problems which otherwise make 
man's nature so confused and contradictory. But, 
lastly, we must remember that this verification must 
be practical ; it must not only be contemplated as 
it lies before us in a system of theology, but must 
be worked out in action. There must be not only 
verification by correspondence \ but also verification by 
obedience. Peace and happiness are not gained 
merely by accepting and assenting to the revelation 
of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but by committing 
ourselves unreservedly to its demands. Our nature 
is so constituted that our actions have a great deal 
to do with our beliefs. If we live in sin, we wilfully 
blind our eyes to truth about God ; spiritual things 
can have no meaning, must become foolishness to 
the natural or carnal man. To such a man the words 
of religion gradually come to have a far-off sound ; 
he gets impatient with them, condemns them as 
cant and hypocrisy. It is to the pure in heart that 
the vision of God is given ; and in proportion as 
we purify ourselves we get to see God more clearly. 



22 The Faith of Centuries. 

Those same phrases which are " cant " to the sinner 
and the worldling are " the words of eternal life " 
to the sincere disciple. 

This then is obvious — that if a man is really 
searching after God, and is anxious to weigh 
impartially the evidence for religion, he is logically 
bound to lead a decent and upright life. Otherwise 
he is prejudging the result of his inquiry, and 
deliberately putting out the eyes which were to 
guide him to the truth. Christ laid down this 
principle very clearly : " If any man will do His will, 
he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." 
The man who will, first, impartially study the scheme 
of the Church's faith, and, secondly, try honestly to 
carry it out in his life, will not fail to "have the 
witness in himself," in the shape of an enlightened 
understanding, purified desires, peace, harmony, and 
order reigning throughout his nature. 

Thus the Christian faith presents itself as an 
answer to the questionings and as the satisfaction 
of the needs of human nature. The faith is backed 
by an immensely strong external evidence for itself 
in its documents and its history. With that I am 
not at present concerned. I have been looking at 
it from the inside, regarding it as a principle which 
brings order and coherence into human life, and 
have been asking whether it works well, solves 
difficulties, and makes that life an intelligible and 
a satisfactory thing. If it does (as I hope I have 
shown reason for believing), thinking people will 
recognise in it a philosophy of surpassing interest ; 



Faith in God. 23 

and if they are convinced also that its historical 
evidence is adequate, they will welcome it, not 
merely as a good working hypothesis, but as the 
most supremely important truth, in which all other 
truths are implicitly contained. 

A. Chandler, 



II. 
£be IRnowlefcoe of <5ok 

OF all the questions which have haunted the 
minds of men, two, and two only, are of the 
first importance : Is there a personal God ? and, 
Does the individual life survive the grave? But at 
the root of both of those questions there lies a third : 
Can God be known at all ; and if so, by what power 
or faculty can we know Him ? It is to this question 
that I am called upon to ask your attention ; and 
you will bear with me if I use the time at our 
disposal in reminding you of one or two facts, simple, 
yet not seldom forgotten, which, in dealing with such 
a question as this, ought always to be kept in view. 

Now, an inquiry into the knowledge of God — the 
discussion whether God can be known to man, and 
by what means that knowledge is to be attained — is 
not primarily a Christian problem. It goes deeper 
even than Christianity itself in this respect — that 
Christianity never asks at all if God can be known 
by man, but simply assumes from the outset that He 
can be known. Christianity has, no doubt, its own 
witnesses and its independent evidence ; and therefore, 



The Knowledge of God. 25 

when you are assured of its truth, it can give you 
very valuable help on the question of the knowledge 
of God, opening out a broad field upon which we 
cannot now enter. On the other hand, if it could 
be definitely proved that God cannot be known by 
us, then, of course, the whole fabric of Christianity, 
as a religious system, would fall immediately to the 
ground. Hence the importance for the Christian, 
when need arises, of being able to give, on this as 
on other points, a reason of the hope that is in him. 
When we consider how many intellectual difficulties, 
and antagonistic beliefs and modes of thought, the 
faith of Christ has had to contend with, we cannot 
help feeling that the mere fact that it exists at all 
in our day is a striking proof of its singular vitality. 
Imagine the strength and stability of a creed which 
was born nineteen centuries ago, which has faced 
criticism in every conceivable form, which has over- 
ridden the most sweeping revolutions in social order, 
in national life, in the world of thought and know- 
ledge, and which still survives, in all its essentials, 
unchanged ! All through the past Christianity has 
been like a great ship in a storm at sea : wave after 
wave of thought or discovery has borne down upon 
it, and time after time it has seemed impossible that 
it could escape being submerged ; yet a moment 
later, the white crests have broken, the mountainous 
drift of water has sunk away, and we see the great 
ship riding on as buoyantly as ever. To-day it has 
to meet, like the fabled ninth wave of the flood, the 
wave of Agnosticism — the denial that God can be 



26 The Faith of Centuries. 

known ; and this, as we have just seen, is the most 
formidable by far that it has ever yet encountered. 
We cannot anticipate in the future any anti-Christian 
movement likely to be so serious as this. Other 
theories and systems have aimed only at this or that 
side of Christian truth ; difficulties have been raised, 
perhaps, as to miracles, or as to the authorship of the 
Gospels, or as to the inspiration of the Bible as 
a whole ; but Agnosticism, and Agnosticism alone, 
strikes at the very root of religion itself. You may 
hold the broadest views on many subjects, and yet 
be not merely a religious man, but a Christian ; but 
you cannot be agnostic and also religious — in any 
sense, at least, of that word " religious " in which the 
world has hitherto understood it. For Agnosticism 
says to men : " You cannot know God. Phenomena 
you may know ; the external and visible aspect of 
things, as they appear to your eye and touch, you 
may know ; but that which lies behind phenomena — 
the Invisible, the Absolute — you cannot know. There 
may be a God, a personal God even in the Christian 
sense. I do not deny it ; but, as I do not think that 
we have power to judge, I suspend my judgment. If 
I worship at all, it can only be, like the Athenians of 
old, before the shrine of the mystery of the world and 
at an altar raised to the Unknown God." 

I. Now, in the first place, we must observe — for 
it is worth observing — that, although Agnosticism is 
somewhat fashionable at present, it is by no means 
a new thing. New things, we know, have an inherent 
attraction for some minds simply on the ground that 



The Knowledge of God. 27 

they are new ; and it cannot be doubted that Agnos- 
ticism has gained numerous adherents who have gone 
over to it with the idea that it is the very latest 
product of nineteenth-century science. This, how- 
ever, is not the case. Like many other things 
supposed to be new in modern thought, it will be 
found to have left very marked traces on different 
periods of the past. Not to go back any further, 
let us take, as an example, a man of considerable 
importance in the history of Greek philosophy— 
Pyrrho, the father of Scepticism. As Pyrrho lived 
about two thousand two hundred years ago, he is 
certainly old enough for our purpose. His creed 
was one of the purest Agnosticism ; and when 
I take down a history of Greek philosophy and 
read his views, I can easily fancy that I have 
before me a treatise by one of our latest scientific 
professors. We cannot know, he said, the reality 
of things. We may express opinions about things 
as they appear to us ; but about that which lies 
behind appearances — the Absolute, the Invisible, the 
Eternal — we can know and say nothing that is 
definite. The true attitude of a wise man is 
suspension of judgment. We cannot know anything 
certain about God ; and all opinions are equally futile 
and worthless. And further, as the difference 
between this and that opinion is insignificant — 
because we cannot know the truth, and it does not 
much matter what we think about it — so the difference 
between this and that action is insignificant ; and 
so indifferent and careless did Pyrrho become, in 



28 The Faith of Centuries. 

behaviour as well as in thought, that it is reported of 
him that, when walking in the road, he would neither 
stop, nor hurry, nor walk slowly, to save himself from 
being run over by a carriage or bitten by a dog — 
simply because, on his principles, it did not matter 
whether he was bitten and run over or not. Here, 
at any rate, four hundred years before Christ, was 
an Agnostic of the purest type ; and from his day 
to our own you will find many others like him. 
Indeed, the whole history of modern thought starts 
with the great philosopher Descartes, who began 
by doubting the very existence of everything and 
everybody in the universe, including himself, and 
who based the whole of his wonderful system, includ- 
ing the belief in God, on the one famous saying, 
" I think ; therefore I am." And thus we are justified 
in taking note of the fact that modern Agnosticism 
is prominent among us, not because it is (as many 
have supposed) our latest discovery, but simply 
because, being a mode of thought as ancient as 
the human mind itself, it has been revived in our 
day with the support of some distinguished names, 
and because it has claimed, rightly or wrongly, the 
sanction and authority of modern science. 

II. But science must be, and ought to be, agnostic. 
Let us mark that fact, which so many of us have 
failed to notice — that science must be, and ought to 
be, agnostic. So far from being surprised or disturbed 
that pure science has no message for us as to the 
knowledge of God, and confesses her ignorance in that 
sphere, it is precisely what we ought to expect, and 



The Knowledge of God. 29 

even to require. We have all heard of the gentleman 
who swept the heavens with his telescope, and pro- 
claimed that he could find no God — as though, a 
modern writer has justly added, God were " an optical 
phenomenon." As a man of science, he kept strictly 
to his own sphere of work until he began to hope 
that with a telescope he would find God : for God 
is indeed not an optical phenomenon, but a Spirit ; 
and it is not through telescopes that spirits can be 
seen. What is science ? Science is the research into 
the phenomena of nature. Its weapon is the human 
intellect. Its methods are the methods of observation 
and experiment. It weighs, it analyses, and it deals, 
by the help of physical organs and physical instru- 
ments, only with those things which may be perceived 
by the bodily senses or inferred from the information 
which they have given us. In that department of 
the world of sense, the world as we see and hear 
and touch it, science is supreme. But the moment 
it goes outside that sphere, and enters the realm of 
the unseen, which is independent of this world of 
sight and touch, it ceases to be science : you may 
call it religion, you may call it philosophy, you may 
call it what you will ; but science it is not. As 
science, it pushes its bright circle of knowledge 
wider and wider out into the dimness of the unknown 
region beyond, as it finds what seemed to stand out 
of reach coming gradually within its grasp ; as science, 
it even draws inferences as to probabilities within 
that unknown region, as, for instance, when an 
astronomer draws reasonable inferences from his 



30 The Faith of Centuries. 

study of the stars as to the probable power and 
majesty of their Creator ; but to speak directly of 
the invisible world does not fall within the province 
of science at all. How could it, unless God were 
" an optical phenomenon " ? All that science can 
say, and with perfect justice, is : " That is not my 
sphere. There my methods are useless and my 
intelligence at fault. Of that world I know nothing 
and teach nothing." You look at a rose, and you 
argue, perhaps, that a thing so exquisite must be 
the product, not of the blind forces of nature, but of 
will and design — in a word, of a Divine Artist. But 
observe that in so doing you act, not as a botanist — 
a man of science — but as a man of faith, a man of 
religion. It is not the duty of a botanist to deal 
so with the flower. His sole business is to treat it as 
a member of the vegetable kingdom, to analyse its 
different parts, and to assign it its proper place in 
the economy of nature. If he chooses to make your 
inference, and say, " God made the flower," he is a 
botanist no longer. The inference lies outside the 
sphere of botany, outside the region of science ; and 
science, so long as it is true science — so long, that is, 
as it deals with the material, and not with the spiritual 
— is, and must always be, agnostic. 

III. But now, if we have thus driven science and 
her intellectual equipment and methods and instru- 
ments out of the spiritual world, what is to be 
done ? Is that world to remain a blank to us, so that 
God indeed cannot be known ; or can we set foot 
within it, and if so, how ? Well, here, of course, 



The Knowledge of God. 3 1 

some scientific teachers have overstepped the limits 
of their own work, and have fallen into a fatal error. 
Because science rightly says that she knows nothing 
outside her own domain, they have come to the 
strange conclusion that therefore nothing can be 
known. Hence has arisen a new and entirely un- 
scientific Agnosticism, which declares dogmatically 
that God cannot be known at all — not merely that 
it does not know Him (which is a perfectly just 
statement), but that He cannot be known at all. 
This is as much as to say that there is no knowledge 
apart from science, and no way of attaining to truth 
except by the intellect. What is our reply ? Our 
reply is that there is a power in us — not that of the 
reason or intellect, as we call it — through which we 
can know God. Between this new Agnosticism and 
any religious view of the world, such as that of 
Christianity, there lies this first and fundamental 
difference : the Agnostic seeks to know God by the 
help of the reason or intellect (the only weapon, as 
we have just seen, which is permissible or possible in 
science) ; and the Christian holds that God is known 
by another faculty in man — the Conscience, or Moral 
Sense. If we can know God only by reason, then 
the Agnostic is right ; but if we can know God by 
the conscience and by spiritual experience, then the 
Christian is right and the Agnostic wrong. Who is 
to judge between the two ? 

We appeal for judgment, in the first place, to 
Christ Himself. His decision, at any rate, is plain. 
The pathway to the knowledge of God lies, He tells 



32 The Faith of Centuries. 

us, through conscience and spiritual experience. " If 
any man will <do His will " — if any man, that is, will 
be true to the light of his conscience* — he, and not 
the man who reasons a&oiit Gddy *" shall know of the 
doctrine, whether it be of God." Again, when the 
Jews asked Him to tell them " plainly " whether He 
were indeed the Christ, His only reply was to point 
them to His works. He would not argue with them, 
nor give them intellectual proof of His mission : 
He appealed at once to that spiritual nature, that 
moral insight, which alone could rightly understand 
what He said and did. And here the argument 
concerns, not merely the Christian who, for whatever 
cause, has faith in Christ, but every man who sees in 
Christ a teacher of real wisdom and goodness. Is it 
likely, we might fairly ask, that a man so good and 
wise as Jesus Christ is everywhere confessed to be 
would be mistaken on this supreme question of God 
being known to man, and mistaken, therefore, on the 
one point on which the whole of His life and teaching 
depends ? Is it likely that that moral and spiritual 
power of His, unparalleled in the history of our race, 
would be at fault on this first and greatest of all 
questions ? Is it likely, is it credible, however mar- 
vellous the progress of mechanical ingenuity and the 
advance of scientific discovery, that we, whose lives 
still stand out so poor and stained and narrow in 
comparison with His, are yet in the right, if we dis- 
pute His deepest thought, reject the human words of 
His prayer, and say no longer, " Our Father which 
art in heaven M ? Such a question we have at least 




33 

a right to [ask of||fj^cj£if^^test scenic of them 
all. 

So we app^^^JUto Christ Hii^se^on this faculty 
of ours for In uiT^ (inn TiYm iiImii we have heard 
Him speak, we turn, again, to the facts and the 
experience of human life. Here, it would seem, the 
decision is the same. Everything in life goes to prove 
that the highest knowledge comes to us, not through 
reasoning and argument and intellectual proof, but 
through that moral insight — a thing mysterious, but 
most real — which we call faith, or intuition, or con- 
science, or the voice of God. You are guilty of a 
secret sin. Something within rebukes and disturbs 
you, and warns you that the thing is wrong. What 
is that something ? It is not reason ; for you can 
easily prove by reason that, as the act or thought 
remains unknown, and does no harm to any man, it 
cannot be materially wrong. And yet you know it 
to be wrong. Why, or how do you know it, if not 
by that gift of conscience which of itself guides you 
to the truth? Ask the martyr how he knows that 
he ought rather to die than to renounce his faith. 
He can give you no logical reason. Argue coolly 
with him, as Crito with Socrates, and it would not 
be difficult to show that his death, far from doing 
good to his cherished cause, will almost certainly pass 
unnoticed — wasted and worthless — and that he will 
do a much greater service to his fellow-men, if he 
will only save himself at the expense of a few idle 
words, and live for many years to fight for his 
religion. All that he can say is that he feels that he 

3 



34 The Faith of Centuries. 

is right ; and the benediction with which humanity 
has crowned the martyr shows that we do, uncon- 
sciously, accept his reason. He has not told us 
"plainly," but we believe him "for the sake of his 
works " ; assured and convinced that no one of the 
great deeds of the world was ever accomplished for 
purely intellectual reasons and on purely intellectual 
grounds. Or finally, to take that sense of beauty 
which is, I think, in reality nothing but our moral 
sense looked at from a special point of view, ask the 
critic of literature how he knows that Shakespeare's 
Othello is a greater play than certain modern plays 
which I might name to you. He can no doubt give 
you intellectual reasons for his preference ; but those 
reasons are an after-thought, and it was not by means 
of them that his choice was settled and his knowledge 
attained. He knows, as we call it, intuitively, or 
instinctively, or as a child might know it, that the 
one drama is greater than the rest. 

IV. But if this be so, and if there is in man this 
Divine instinct which helps us to the highest know- 
ledge in art and in life, of beauty and of goodness, 
then it will help us also in the knowledge of God, of 
which all that other knowledge is itself a part ; and 
the failure of modern Agnosticism has lain in the 
fact that it has ignored this instinct and set up 
the reason to be the sole measure of the world. To 
the Christian, we may say, there are three steps 
in the knowledge of God. First, he has faith ; 
next, he finds his faith justified and enlarged by 
experience of life ; and so, lastly, he comes to a 



The Knowledge of God. 35 

reasonable knowledge. These steps are found even 
in the knowledge of that mystery of the Trinity 
which might appear so entirely an intellectual thing. 
If a man, refusing to be a materialist, believes in the 
Divinity in Nature — that is, in the Fatherhood of 
God ; if he believes in the Divinity in Man — that is, 
in the Son of God ; if he believes in the Divinity 
in Conscience — that is, in the Spirit of God : if, 
believing this, he believes also that there can be but 
one God by whom and in whom are all things, and 
finds this belief justified by his experience of nature, 
of human life, of his own heart and soul — then, I 
say, he knows something of that truth which in 
our weak and inadequate phraseology we call the 
doctrine of the Trinity. And it is by experience 
that he knows it. Would you know God better? 
Do, and you shall know. Would you know a God 
at present unknown to you ? Why not take the 
faith of another— yes, of Christ Himself — as a 
working hypothesis (since you cannot take your 
own), and see whether in time, by patience and 
purity and uprightness, it is not confirmed by 
results ? There is for all of us no other approach 
to the paths of knowledge save through the golden 
gates of Faith and Charity. No intellectual appre- 
hension of religious dogmas, no repetition of set 
phrases, no adherence to orthodox opinions will 
avail us at all without charity and faith. But if we 
have those two in any measure, we may go forward 
well content. We shall remember, indeed, that 
while God is too complex to be summed up in any 



36 The Faith of Centuries. 

single formula, He is also so great that we cannot 
touch, as it were, more than the hem of His garment ; 
that, therefore, the language least befitting a Christian 
to apply to Him is that which may almost be used with 
regard to a man of whose actions we are practically 
certain and whose character we perfectly understand ; 
and that therefore, also, in a very real sense it is still 
at the altar of an Unknown God that we worship, 
and before a Holy of Holies never to be trodden by 
human foot. Yet at the same time we believe that 
even to us will God reveal Himself in proportion as 
we try to do His will ; that though, like the seraphim 
of old before the burning glory of His presence, we 
have to veil our faces as we go about His service, 
yet even for us will be fulfilled the promise of the 
benediction of Christ : " Blessed are the pure in 
heart, for they shall see God." 

S. A. Alexander. 



III. 
jfaitb in 3mmortaIit\>* 

THERE are a certain number of ideas which 
seem to be common to the whole human race. 
All men have the same ideas of numbers — that is, 
when they take to counting, they use the same concep- 
tions of number — though many of the less advanced 
peoples can go but a short distance in arithmetic. 
Again, it seems to have been made clear by recent 
investigations that all men have some notions of 
religion, and develop in a somewhat similar way 
their religious theory and practice. The idea of 
immortality has also a very wide prevalence. Almost 
all nations seem to have some hope that man will in 
some sense survive the shock of death and continue 
his existence, though he passes out of the companion- 
ship of his fellow-men. The great exception to this 
rule seems to be, curiously enough, the nation whose 
religious genius was far the highest in the whole 
history of man. The Jewish people, though it is 
perhaps going too far to say that they had no idea 
of a future life, seem to have given strangely little 
attention to it at first. With this partial exception 

37 



38 The Faith of Centuries. 

the idea or the hope of immortality seems to have 
been common to all men, and to have been 
usually connected with religion. The dead seem 
to have been treated as if they belonged to a 
world beyond this of sight and sound, out of which 
the Divine Powers exercised their influence upon 
men. Hence, in considering the question of immor- 
tality, we must always remember that it has usually 
appeared to men to stand in very close connection 
with religion, as if the solution of the problem of 
man's life were to be expected to follow from religion. 
This connection survived at a time when a great 
many things were lost, in the so-called natural 
religion of the last century. The Deists, who 
endeavoured, as they thought, to recall men to the 
simplest type of religion — a type which was natural 
to all men and almost self-evident — enrolled immor- 
tality in their list of primary religious certainties. 
They thought that religion was almost completely 
covered by the two propositions, that God exists, 
and that man is immortal. The connection between 
these two seems to be really rather remote. And as 
a matter of fact, when we come to treat man's destiny 
as a problem, it is not strictly a religious question 
at all, but simply a question as to the nature and 
constitution of man. It may be brought within the 
purview of religion by being made an item in a 
revelation, but in itself it belongs purely to the 
theory of human life. 

I. We will now consider some of the various lines 
of argument which have been adduced in support of 



Faith in Immortality. 39 

the belief, remembering always that the belief exists 
and has maintained itself as a conviction quite 
independently of any argument. And, first, let us 
notice that for the purposes of argument a distinc- 
tion has been made in the nature of man. The 
body obviously surrenders to the law of corruption ; 
it has therefore been assumed, when the subject was 
brought under scientific investigation, that practically 
only the soul need be discussed. Various practices 
in connection with the dead — such, for instance, as 
the Egyptian method of preserving the body by 
embalming — show a desire to retain even the body 
in existence ; but historically the discussion has been 
restricted to the immortality of the soul. 

It is clear that if this is to be the point to which 
attention is to be directed, the whole object of the 
proof must be to show that the soul does not share 
the death of the body — that it is in some way exempt 
from the law of change and decay which rules the 
body. And it is also clear that this is extremely 
difficult to prove. There are no direct lines of evidence. 
The soul is as completely outside the range of expe- 
rience after death as the body. The body corrupts 
by degrees and disappears ; the soul, which has never 
been the direct object of experience, leaves off making 
even indirect signs of its presence. And the half-real, 
half-imaginary visits of ghosts hardly amount to 
anything that science can lay hold of. We are 
therefore thrown back on argument from the general 
characteristics of human life. 

There are two regions of human life in which man 



40 The Faith of Centuries. 

seems most independent of the material world — his 
intellectual and his moral life. And the question is 
whether these tell us anything as to the permanence 
of his nature. On the intellectual side a great deal 
has been said. Plato, for instance, laid great stress 
on the capacity of the mind for attaining universal 
ideas. He found that men go through life calling 
this, that, and the other action good and brave and 
the like, claiming to know what these words mean, 
and why they are applied in particular cases. As a 
rule, for instance, it is called brave to stand against 
the foe ; but there are occasions when flight, or at 
least apparent flight, seems the truer bravery. Plato 
argued that men must have somewhere in them such 
a knowledge of bravery as would enable them to 
apply the term rightly on occasions apparently so 
contrary as those instanced above. They cannot 
really use the terms without significance, nor can 
they really be believed to use them casually and 
without any guiding principle of reference. Their 
experience in the world would never give them this 
rule, for all such ideas are confused by being 
individualised. The true goodness and the true 
bravery are only partially manifested in the brave 
and good actions which men do : the circumstances 
of the action make differences which are all declen- 
sions from the ideal. Hence he argued that men 
must have obtained this knowledge outside this life, 
in a world where the soul lived without the body and 
looked face to face on truth. The bodily life was 
only a temporary eclipse of the soul's true life. It 



Faith in Immortality. 41 

was immortal, and never began or ceased to live ; only 
from time to time it entered by means of birth into 
this mortal state, and passed from it by death. 

This argument, which appears in this form in the 
dialogue called the Pkcedrtis, is typical of the line 
of argument pursued both by Plato and other subse- 
quent writers. The point of it is that the mind 
in its intellectual history proves itself independent 
of the transient material world. It has the power of 
creating ideas, or of recognising them as embodied 
in the material order ; and these ideas have, as it 
were, the element of eternity in them. They are not 
dependent upon the changeful processes of nature ; 
but rather they control these processes, and enable 
us to attain such knowledge as is possible to us 
of the world around. That is, they show that the 
soul is independent of matter. Matter is inert, and 
depends for movement upon some impulse conveyed 
to it. The soul is akin to the force that gives the 
impulse. The world is chaotic and moves with- 
out conscious reason ; it is soul or mind which 
really guides it, and the individual soul or mind 
recognises its kinship with the universal Reason in 
the world. 

It is manifest that this is an argument of con- 
siderable importance. The exercise of the intellect 
in universal ideas is certainly its most fundamental 
characteristic, and it is obvious that in our experience 
we get not universal ideas, but particular illustrations 
of them. We see not the ideal man before us, the 
man who is neither tall nor short, dark nor fair, fat 



42 The Faith of Centuries. 

nor thin ; but we see before us a particular man who 
has some of these and other characters which are 
unimportant, but also has all those characteristics with- 
out which he would not be man at all. And when 
we say This is a man, we apply to him a universal 
predicate which is true not only of him here and 
now, but of him and all other men now and for ever. 
It is certain, therefore, that the mind has the power 
of dealing universally with the experience presented 
in particular form ; and it may be added that with- 
out such a power it would be impossible for it to 
think at all, in any serious sense of the word. Hence 
in its most fundamental activity it deals with ideas 
which are independent of time, place, and change. 
Plato thought this a sign of the immortality of the 
soul ; and the question now is whether this is so. 

It seems that there are two points that may be 
taken in regard to it, one of which forms a serious and 
the other a fatal objection to it. It is a very serious 
objection that it proves rather too much. It proves 
not only that the soul survives the shock of death, 
but also that it is eternal in both directions. It has 
existed as well as is to exist through all eternity. 
As death is only an apparent end to human life, so 
birth is only an apparent beginning. Our human 
experience here is only an episode, an accident, in 
a history that is essentially different from it and 
superior to it. And thus this life can never be fully 
accounted for. It is really impossible to say why 
the soul should have come into this state, and what 
good it gets by coming. In the Phcedrus Plato 



Faith in Immortality. 43 

regards the descent of the soul as being in some 
way a moral lapse, thus making the whole of this life 
a blunder. This view of it is naturally common to 
those who have found the true life of the soul else- 
where than here. But, after all, we do require to 
explain this life ; it will not do, in our anxiety to 
prove immortality, to destroy the value and signifi- 
cance of this life altogether.* 

This then is a serious objection to this point of 
view, though by itself we can hardly call it fatal. 
The fatal objection is that by Plato's theory an impos- 
sible relation is established between the soul and 
the body. It is assumed, consciously or unconsciously, 
that the soul is really an independent thing that lives 
by its own laws, and is able to treat the body as if it 
were simply a part of the material world. The body 
is simply its organ, and is almost passive under its 
influence. The reason why the soul fails is for the 
simple reason that the body is a clog upon its 
energies, and a barrier between it and truth. Thus 
the true life of the soul is independent of the body ; 
the body drops off at death, and leaves the soul free. 
This is unfortunately a mistake in fact, as Aristotle 
was quick to point out. The soul may be independent 
and separate in a sense, but we know it only in 

* The idea of pre-existence is untenable for two reasons : (i) it offers 
no rational explanation of the entry of the soul upon this state of being, 
which is ex hypothesi inferior ; (2) it fails to explain moral life. Morally 
speaking, a soul is proved here in this life ; its experience here is real, 
and this life determines its future : it cannot be that this is one of a 
crowd of forgotten lives : this would deprive it of all real meaning. See 
below, p. 50, for idea of probation. 



44 The Faith of Centuries. 

connection with a material environment. And, what 
is more even than that, the soul only obtains its know- 
ledge of things through the body. We not only 
have no experience of a soul acting alone ; we cannot 
even conceive what such action would be like. The 
whole of our knowledge reaches us ultimately through 
the body, and we are entirely in the dark as to any 
further possibility of thought. Hence the failure of 
this argument is complete. Not only does it involve 
a conclusion as to the pre-existence of the soul which 
causes considerable difficulty ; it also contains within 
itself an assumption as to the relation of soul and 
body which is not verified in experience. The whole 
of succeeding thought has only tended to emphasise 
this failure. Modern investigations as to the nature 
of the soul have shown beyond question that, as we 
know it, it is most closely united with the body. It 
has become possible to locate in the brain different 
activities of the soul, and to bring into the closest 
connection the physical condition of the nervous 
system and the contents of the mind. Hence, though 
the actual points raised by Plato are true enough in 
themselves, the assumption upon which he goes in 
his arguments is invalid. It is perfectly true that 
the mind contributes a universality which it does not 
derive from experience ; but it does not follow from 
this that the mind works independently of the body 
altogether. The dissolution of the body, so far as 
we can infer from the phenomena of thought, involves 
the extinction of the soul also. There is no proof of 
the immortality of the soul in this region. 



Faith in Immortality. 45 

These remarks upon the form of the argument 
which Plato used apply to all arguments based upon 
the functions of the intellect, or indeed upon the 
functions of the soul, as such, altogether. There is 
no part of the soul's activity of which we know any- 
thing that is not in connection with some bodily 
activity. And therefore there is no part of the life 
of man here which implies that it is itself eternal 
and imprisoned in the material environment. Even 
spiritualistic phenomena, though they seem to imply 
the continuous existence of persons in some condition 
or other, reach us only through material means. 
Ghosts, as they are described to us, bang on tables 
or appeal in some shadowy way to our sense 
of sight, and therefore use similar means of com- 
municating to those we use in ordinary life, only 
much less effectually. It is impossible, therefore, to 
quote these in defence of a theory of immortality 
w T hich rests upon a dualism between soul and body. 
They prove, if they are true, the continuity of life ; they 
are valueless as regards the immortality of the soul. 

II. But it is time to pass on to the consideration of 
the moral life. We have already set aside the evidence 
of moral life, considered merely as a function of the 
soul. If, therefore, it is to be of any value, it must 
be from a different point of view altogether. It is 
obvious that as we survey the world the moral sense 
is very far from being satisfied. The moral sense 
has certain clear and definite rules of conduct which 
it expects to have illustrated in the order of the world. 
It is not content to move on its own lines, and regard 



46 The Faith of Centuries. 

the world as an alien thing ; it expects and demands 
to find itself at home in the world. And this is 
contravened by the presence of injustice and wrong. 
Men act as they like, to all appearance ; and it looks 
as if it did not much matter to the world. Those 
who do wrong are not uniformly punished in this 
world. The incidence of misfortune is not easy to 
bring under any moral principle. At times, when 
society thinks that it is in any danger, it turns upon 
some criminal and punishes him severely. At times, 
when their wickedness does not interfere with the 
general comfort, men are left to do exactly as they 
like, and grow rich, if they can, at the expense of 
better men than they. In view of this the conscience 
rebels. It cannot endure the thought that this world 
is all there is, or that the principles of which it is 
so profoundly certain are defied by the existing order 
of things. In the presence of such an experience as 
this world offers, it can only infer the existence of 
another, governed more firmly, less subject to deceit 
and injustice. This world being what it is, the con- 
science must either assume the existence of another 
or admit that the rule of evil is supreme. 

This argument has, of course, taken various forms 
at different times. It had much to do with Plato's 
anxiety on the subject of immortality, and it was 
the line on which the question developed among the 
Jews. In its simplest form it is merely a means of 
correcting the inequalities of the present life, and of 
strengthening the conscience in its convictions ; it 
is the resource of a mind that would otherwise be 



Faith in Immortality. 47 

driven towards despair. So, for instance, in Plato's 
Gorgias the false judgments of this world are attri- 
buted to one special cause of error — the confusion 
engendered by the material covering of things. He 
tells, under the form of a myth, how in old times 
men were judged on the day of their death and 
before they actually died. Hence rich men brought 
up all their friends to say how excellent they had 
been, and the mistakes of this world were continued 
in the world below. Zeus therefore, finding that the 
isles of the blest were getting full of scoundrels of all 
sorts, altered the arrangements of things. Men were 
no longer to know the day of their death, and were 
to be judged after it. They were to leave behind 
the various coverings in which they had concealed 
the true character of their souls, and go before unerr- 
ing judges who themselves had escaped from the 
trammels of the flesh. Thus the errors of this world 
would be corrected in the next, and absolute truth 
and justice would reign. 

In somewhat the same way, but with even deeper 
moral disturbance than was possible even to Plato, 
the Jews looked upon the confusion in the world. 
To their minds, as the Psalms show clearly in many 
places, the breaches of moral order in the world and 
the success of the wicked seemed to involve the 
justice and providence of God. It was not only a 
serious blow to the convictions of the moral sense to 
find the ungodly triumphing and the righteous for- 
saken ; it seemed as if God had forgotten to fulfil His 
promises. Their religion as well as their moral sense 



48 The Faith of Centuries. 

was in jeopardy. The intensity of the problem as it 
presented itself to their minds is seen in the Books of 
Job and the Preacher. They are unable to settle the 
question ; they retain their convictions in the face of 
what is very near despair. In the Book of Wisdom we 
have the clearest assertion of the doctrine of immor- 
tality in this connection. The author describes the 
confidence of the ungodly, reasoning with themselves, 
but not aright, arguing from the shortness of life 
to the justification of immorality. There is nothing 
beyond, they say, and therefore they may as well 
amuse themselves while this life lasts, persecuting the 
poor righteous man whose life is a constant rebuke 
to them. " But the souls of the righteous are in 
the hands of God, and there shall no torment touch 
them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to 
die." The world beyond the grave, of the reality 
of which the author is certain, redresses the wrongs 
and confirms the religious convictions of righteous 
men in this world. The greatest confusion and dis- 
order in this world is rectified in the world to come. 

This is the simplest way in which the moral order 
leads to the conviction of immortality. We will 
pause here again, then, and consider exactly how 
far it takes us. It is obvious at once that it is far 
from the objections which we raised to the previous 
line of argument. It does not involve us in any theory 
of pre-existence, and it introduces no breach of unity 
into the nature of man. It starts from the idea of 
wrong which is certainly present, and certainly affects 
the whole of life. And it is true that, if this life is 



Faith in Immortality. 49 

all there is, the justification of moral impulses is very 
hard to find. It certainly is not always to the advan- 
tage of a man in this world to follow the lead of 
the moral law ; there is no possible claim upon him 
to do so, if he can break it with impunity — that is, if 
he can break it without causing sufficient injury to 
others to call the attention of society. From this 
point of view, success or failure in avoiding punish- 
ment would make a very fair test. To be punished 
would mean that a man had got beyond the line of 
society's toleration, that he had done a thing which 
society felt bound to condemn and prevent. Other- 
wise there would be no harm in his satisfying his 
own desires. Society would change ; civilisation 
would grow ; different things would be condemned 
and ignored ; but the rule would be ultimately the 
same. Under these conditions the moral law would 
represent a gratuitously exacting ideal. Its presence 
might be a convenient factor .in the evolution of 
society, but it would not be finally justified as abso- 
lutely right. Thus the facts upon which this argument 
proceeds are so far made good : the moral law may 
have a strong hold upon the individual conscience, 
but it is not verified in the outer world. 

The fault of the argument is that it establishes 
no certain connection between this world and that 
beyond the grave. It simply assumes another, in order 
to correct the deficiencies of this. This world exists, 
and is defective ; but if the defects could somehow 
be eradicated from this order, the necessity for a world 
beyond would seem to disappear. The connection 

4 



50 The Faith of Centuries, 

between them is weak ; it belongs rather to the 
region of imagination or hope than to that of argu- 
ment ; it does not prove the existence of a world of 
justice — it only declares man's very profound desire 
for it. As an argument, then, it fails. 

But it is possible to take a wider view of life than 
we have done so far. So far we have considered evil 
merely as a fact — an unfortunate fact, that is certainly 
real. We have thought of the moral law as a system 
of principles existing, again as a mere matter of fact, 
in our own consciences. We have made no effort to 
connect them. But now, supposing that we endeavour 
to trace the moral value of the existence of evil, we 
are brought in view of the idea of probation. As we 
see things, evil has this function — to test and prove 
the character of men, to reveal their moral affinities. 
So far as we can understand, a firm moral character 
is always developed by means of the possibilities of 
evil — that is, by means of temptation. The untried 
nature is at a lower level, even though it is far from 
actual evil, than one " that has seen, by the means of 
evil, that good is best." And thus evil, though we do 
not necessarily regard it as essential, is at any rate 
partly explained. 

And from this point we get a new outlook towards 
the other world. Probation means not only that this 
life is touched with failure, but that it is preparatory. 
It is incomplete, educational, formative. Those who 
live here are building up their character day by day, 
and developing towards some fixed mould or ideal. 
Now it is clear that if this is a true view of life, to 



Faith in Immortality. 51 

spend it in education, and to be extinguished as soon 
as the process in complete, would reduce it at once to 
an irrational absurdity. The moment that the idea 
of probation is allowed, there comes in with it the 
necessity of a future life. It is almost a contradiction 
in terms to talk of life as a preparation or probation, 
if nothing follows. 

It is clear then that the value of the idea of 
probation for our present purpose lies not in any 
conjectural redress of mere wrong, but in the fact that it 
definitely connects this life with a future with which 
it is organically one. It goes to show not merely 
the presence of deficiencies here, but the actual 
incompleteness of this life. And thus without any 
complications from the direction of pre-existence, it 
brings this life and the other into one scheme. 

The whole question then now is whether we can 
sustain this notion of probation, whether we can give 
reasons for thinking it valid. It has certainly pre- 
vailed very widely. The doctrines of the world to 
come in most nations usually indicate its presence. 
The souls of men are assigned to different forms of 
life, according as they have succeeded or failed under 
this world's test. Plato combines the notion with 
his theory of transmigration, and regards one life as 
a means of acquiring experience enabling us to 
choose rightly for the next. In his myth at the end 
of the Republic he describes the souls coming up one 
by one to choose the destiny that is to govern them 
in the new life that is shortly to begin for them. He 
tells us of one unfortunate man who rushes upon 



52 The Faith of Centuries. 

the destiny of a wealthy but wicked tyrant, and he 
explains the mistaken choice by saying that it was the 
soul of one who had spent his days in a quiet state 
without philosophy ; it was the soul of one, as we 
should say, who had never had to face temptation. 
His life, though it had been virtuous, had failed to 
fit him to make his choice. 

It is not, however, by referring to particular instances 
that the idea of probation can be made good ; it 
really assumes a belief in a particular theory of the 
world. No doubt the existing facts in the world 
imply,as Butler thought, a tendency to reward virtue 
and punish vice ; but it does not get far beyond a 
tendency. On the other side are all the obscure cases 
which startled the moral sense of the Old Testament 
writers, and provide still the stock arguments of 
sceptics against the moral order. The idea of pro- 
bation requires us to assume not merely a future life, 
but the existence of a providential Governor of the 
world. It can only be sustained if the world is under 
the government of God, and forms one system guided 
and sustained by Him. 

Thus we return to the theological view of life with 
which we began. Immortality is a notion which, if 
it is to hold true, involves us in a theological view of 
all human existence. The universal range of man's 
thoughts will not prove it, nor the pressing demands 
of the moral sense, though both these lines of reason- 
ing involve the purely material theory of life in 
perplexity. We cannot feel sure that man is made 
for some purpose which this world does not satisfy, 



Faith in Immortality. 53 

until we see his life in the light of the Divine Pro- 
vidence. Then the moral ideas which connect it 
with a future are themselves justified, and the whole 
is systematised and its rational cohesion declared. 

But we have not yet said all that belongs to this 
particular line of argument. That aspect of life which 
brings it under the purview of Providence has other 
associations. It means that God is on the side of 
the moral law ; in other words, that the moral law 
represents His will for man. And this throws quite 
a new light upon evil. From this point of view it 
cannot be regarded as a necessary element in the 
world's constitution, even though it plays a part in 
the process of probation ; it is a breach of the moral 
law, a rebellion against the will of God. It requires 
to be ejected in some way from the order of the 
world ; it has to be declared openly to be wrong. 
Now in this connection, which it would not be to our 
purpose to develop further, we come in sight of the 
whole scheme of salvation, culminating in the Cross 
and the Resurrection. Among other things, one 
conspicuous result of the whole process of Christ's life 
was to affirm beyond dispute the moral intuitions of 
men. It declared the reality of their sense of evil, and 
of their sense that it was something more than a mistake 
or a miscalculation of expediency. And it declared 
the invincible supremacy of good in the wider order 
of the world. And thus the Resurrection is more than 
a salient and striking instance of the return of one 
from the dead : if this were all, the matter might have 
been taken as settled in the case of Lazarus. It 



54 The Faith of Centuries. 

affirms the reality and truth of all those ideas with 
which the notion of immortality is most closely 
connected, and from which, as it appears, the most 
hopeful line of proof seems to come. It is impossible 
to believe that the moral claims upon the order of the 
world are satisfied, if death is the end of all things. 
The Resurrection is a declaration both of the validity 
of moral intuitions in themselves and of their exten- 
sion into a further range of life. It is a fact in 
the moral and spiritual world that Christ could not 
be holden of death ; it indicates the degree in which 
the physical world is at the command of the moral 
order. Thus the Resurrection leads us to approach 
the question from a totally different point of view 
from that of pre-Christian speculation. In earlier 
days the question had been whether we could select 
out of the various elements in man's life any one 
that could be regarded as permanent through death — 
whether it was possible to distinguish the permanent 
from the changeful elements in it. The result of the 
change produced by the Resurrection is that the life 
of man as a whole is seen to have a hold upon 
eternity. That aspect of it which most conspicuously 
rebels against the limits of time is declared to be 
essentially true and valid. The sense that the moral 
ideas fail unless man is in some sense immortal is 
justified by the Resurrection. Man is shown to be a 
spiritual being, living in a spiritual world. 

This is of the greatest importance in connection 
with certain difficulties which we have already con- 
sidered. We have seen that ancient writers, and 



Faith in Immortality. 55 

many modern ones who follow in their train, have 
met with disaster in their attempts to show that the 
soul was immortal, as distinct from and opposed to 
the body. It was urged in opposition to these asser- 
tions that there was no evidence of the soul acting in 
separation from the body. The wider knowledge of 
the bodily organism in later times has only confirmed 
this position. The more we know of the action of 
the mind, the more closely it seems to be united to 
the body in all that it does. It must therefore be 
cause of considerable congratulation that the concep- 
tion of immortality to which the Resurrection gives 
rise is not that of the immortality of the soul. This 
doctrine, as such, is no part of the Christian creed : 
the doctrine which is part of the Christian creed is 
that of the resurrection of the body, which is a very 
different thing. It remains for us to consider this 
doctrine in connection with our present question. 

Let us first ask what it is that the body does, in 
what relation it stands to the soul. It is clear that, 
so far as we know it, it is the invariable instrument 
of the soul's action. We do not know ourselves even 
in this life except in connection with bodily changes. 
Further, the body presents an appearance of con- 
tinuity, which is not, however, borne out by the facts. 
Some changes are perceived occurring over consider- 
able periods of time ; others are minute and imper- 
ceptible, though they are ceaselessly in operation. It 
has been said, indeed, that the entire body of every 
man changes every seven years. Hence, when we 
say that a man's body is the same all through his 



56 The Faith of Centuries. 

life, we use the word in a very general sense, without 
any attempt at scientific precision. We recognise by 
its means the presence of the game individual ; the 
changes which take place do not seriously affect his 
appearance as a rule ; but the idea of sameness is 
very loosely applied to the bodily organism. We 
mean much more the continuity of a life which is 
manifested in much the same way, under much the 
same conditions from day to day. Moreover, there 
are certain limits, it would seem, to the changes 
which we should allow within the range of what we 
call sameness. In some sense the soul is supposed 
to impress the body with its own character ; the body 
is moulded and displays the features, so to say, of 
the soul. Hence, though it gives us little mental 
disturbance when we learn of the continual process of 
change which the body undergoes, we should regard 
the transplantation of a soul into another body than 
that which properly belonged to it as a hopeless 
break in continuity. The history of body and soul 
is somehow assumed to be the same, and such a 
breach as this would practically destroy all concep- 
tion of identity. In other words, physical continuity, 
however great the changes may be which it involves, 
is of the essence of our idea of sameness as applied 
to the growth of the bodily organism : its relation to 
the soul is always the same ; the bodily organism is 
the instrument and exponent of the soul. 

The doctrine of the resurrection of the body seems 
to assert two things: (i) that the soul continues to 
express itself through a material medium ; (2) that 



Faith in Immortality. 57 

this material medium is somehow to be identified 
with that which has all along formed the home of 
the individual soul. It should be observed that in 
the original languages of the Creeds the emphasis lies 
upon the first of these two points. Belief is expressed 
in the resurrection of the flesh (carnis resurrectionem 
— ddpicos avdaraaiv) — in the material medium rather 
than in its individual embodiment. But it is obvious 
that the second is involved in the first ; flesh is 
nothing, if it is not individualised and informed by 
the spirit. 

It is true that a very great obscurity hangs over 
what we may venture to call the physiology of the 
risen body ; and crude notions of the Resurrection 
have greatly tended towards making the whole idea 
impossible. The physiology of paganism has been 
applied to the illustration of the Christian creed ; 
the future life has been imagined on the analogy of 
the descriptions of Hades in Homer. And, again, it 
has been assumed that the resurrection of the body 
implied the collection of all the scattered atoms of 
the human frame : cremation, for instance, has been 
condemned on the ground that it would prevent such 
a reconstruction of the body. Difficulties such as 
these have arisen from an excess of wisdom in dealing 
with the subject. There is very little said in the 
Bible as to the nature of risen humanity, and what 
is said is in many cases couched in symbolic lan- 
guage. We have fragmentary accounts of our Lord's 
appearances after the Resurrection, and these are all 
set forth in the simple, unexplained fashion which is 



58 The Faith of Centuries. 

characteristic of the Gospels throughout. The authors 
tell of occasions when Christ reappeared to His 
chosen friends ; but they describe only the method 
and occasion of His appearance, and do not discuss 
or explain the condition of His body. In some 
important respects it seems to have resembled the 
body which they had known before the death upon 
the cross ; in others, it differed wholly from all 
human bodies as we know them. It was apparently 
free from certain limitations which bind us, and did 
not always bring instant recognition (St. Luke xxiv.). 
But changed though it was, they had no hesitation 
in identifying it as really His by various sure tokens, 
as men recognise through some familiar gesture or 
word a friend who has been long absent, and upon 
whom earthly change has passed. 

Apart from these historic records, the language we 
find in the New Testament is largely symbolical. St. 
Paul speaks (i Cor. xv.) of the analogy of the seed 
and the full-grown plant, and has been sharply criti- 
cised in recent times for so doing. It seems, however, 
as if there might still be something to be said for his 
argument. He is endeavouring to meet a scepticism 
which rested on the impossibility of such an event as 
the Resurrection, and he calls attention to a case in 
nature where a radical change takes place by impercep- 
tible degrees. The final shape taken by the plant is 
physically continuous with the condition of the seed : 
there is no breach of continuity ; there is an identity 
between seed and plant in spite of all the change. 
And this is exactly what is wanted for the occasion. 



Faith in Immortality. 59 

St. Paul emphasises the possibility of an identical 
life persisting through the most complete changes. 
And this is surely what is meant by the resurrection 
of the flesh. It means that the life we live here 
is continuous with a life beyond the grave ; that 
there no less than here the soul will express itself 
through a body ; and though we may know but 
little in the way of detail as to the constitution and 
character of this body, yet the example of the Risen 
Christ gives us hints of that which is to come upon us. 
By means of the doctrine of the resurrection of 
the body the Creed does for the belief in immor- 
tality what is required to complete it and make it 
rational. It is not, as might at first appear, an 
additional difficulty in our way ; it is a conception 
of immortality which is free from the objections 
which haunt the older views of it. It enables us to 
give credence to the deep-seated belief in the con- 
tinuity of human life beyond the grave, without 
calling upon us to solve the insoluble question of the 
exact relation between soul and body. And, more- 
over, it saves the question of immortality from being 
an isolated matter of metaphysical interest, by con- 
necting it closely with the whole Christian theory 
of things. 

T. B. Strong. 



IV. 

Jfaitb in 3em& Christ* 

I WOULD speak to you to-night of this faith of 
ours in Jesus Christ ; and I suppose I am to 
speak in defence of it as to those who believe or who 
would believe, but who find themselves, as we all do, 
in the presence of many perplexities and inquiries in 
our own hearts, or from others asking, " How am I 
to believe? How am I to hold this belief? What, 
after all, are my grounds ? I would believe if I could, 
but I cannot, so dim, so puzzling, so doubtful seems 
the ground on which we walk here." So the beseech- 
ing cry goes up from hearts that are bewildered to 
those who preach, saying, " Tell me, you who believe, 
who seem so firm in your belief, so strong that you 
can deliver it and implore others to share it, how did 
you believe, and why ? What are the proofs and 
evidences that seem to you so clear ? Give me your 
reasons, that I may know what is your mind about 
it, and may share that belief and that joy which seem 
to be yours. Tell us your faith." That is what 
people, I suppose, are asking the preacher. 

* These two addresses were given from rough notes, and are printed 
from the corrected shorthand report. 

60 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 61 

And first, to meet that inquiry, let me just say a few 
words about the nature which belongs to all grounds 
of belief and all evidences of faith of whatever kind. 
These grounds, these evidences, will never account for 
the whole belief. There are never such proofs and 
such evidences as can mechanically create faith in 
this person or in that, wherever they are applied. 
For just consider what belief is. Belief is a personal 
intimacy with God ; it is the contact of the soul with 
God; it is the friendship between God and man. 
That is faith. Faith means that these two have 
learned somehow to know one another, and to trust 
one another, and to love one another. Now what 
proofs and what evidences are you going to give 
for a friendship you have formed— a friendship with 
another man ? Can you tell the grounds why you 
trust him, why you have singled him out and said, 
" This is my friend " ? Could you explain to another 
person perfectly what reasons you have had for hold- 
ing on by that man's word? Can you tell another 
why you love him? And friendship is the note of 
faith ; faith in God is friendship with God. Faith is 
the meeting, the mingling, of spirit with spirit, when 
the soul touches God, and, touching Him, knows Him 
and believes. And every soul touches God for itself, 
and touches God at a separate spot ; forms a special 
intimacy of its own with God — an intimacy of friend- 
ship and love which belongs to it alone in all the 
world ; so that it alone knows God from that place 
where it is, having that character which it has — knows 
Him individually with that peculiar intensity which it 



62 The Faith of Centuries. 

can share with no other, for with no other can it share 
its own personal identity. So the faith of each soul 
has a separate story of its own — the story of how it 
found its God, learned to know Him and to trust 
Him more and more, and at last to surrender to Him 
and then to love Him. 

Now that is the story of faith — the story ot each 
soul's discovery of the God who loves it. And 
if, then, you ask me the grounds for my faith, 
how can I tell it you ? I should have to tell you 
the whole of my spiritual history, if I were to give 
you the story and the grounds and the evidences of 
my faith. How can I deliver that up to you ? What 
words could convey it ? Why, I cannot tell it myself 
to myself, — the story of how I came to believe in God 
through Jesus Christ — the story of the organic growth 
of my life — the story, the long troubled story, of how 
the Holy Spirit toiled within my soul to succour it, 
and to recover and to cleanse it, and to warn it, and to 
revive it, and to quicken it, and to turn it towards 
my God. That long story would go far back to the 
earliest memories of life, of my mother, — to childhood's 
habits, customs, associations ; to youth, with im- 
pulses, instincts, aspirations, sins, falls, temptations, 
recoveries, stumblings, risings — all the growth of the 
faculties and capacities — all the brimming tide of life 
coming upward, now stained and tainted, and then 
purified and absolved : — all that is the story of my 
faith. Thousands and thousands of prayers, and 
of entreaties, and of cries — all the eucharists and 
absolutions — all the good instincts and impulses 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 63 

that are felt coming and going like the wind under 
the impulse of the Spirit, who is Himself the wind 
— imaginations, movements far out of my control, 
stirrings, voices, calls, friends, companions, and the 
Church and the Saints, — they all belong to the story 
of how it was that I believed in Jesus Christ. How 
can I tell it ? How say what has happened ? Yet 
that is belief, that is faith ; and the whole of that will 
have to be told in order to tell why I believe. Grounds, 
evidences, proofs — these have only a limited work 
round and about this story of the life, which is a 
separate story for each soul, and can never be handed 
over in a parcel by the post to any one who wants 
it. There are, no doubt, reasonings and arguments ; 
there are grounds, there are proofs, very often, which 
faith has dug up for itself when it has been formed, — 
reasons which it found to be at work in the act by 
which it won its faith, or suggestions which just 
touched it at the right moment or which turned it in 
a direction which proved favourable, or probabilities 
which influenced it at crises, or broad general argu- 
ments and pressures and influences such as belong to 
the whole movement and current of men's lives and 
tell them to look and see and believe. But, then, 
these influences have to make their entry into each 
soul separately ; and though the grounds of the 
evidences be the same, yet they acquire a different 
proportion and a different perspective with every new 
soul that they touch. These are the grounds, the 
broad general abstract influences, pressures, tendencies, 
which can be brought out and laid before you ; but 



64 The Faith of Centuries. 

the faith which uses them, the faith which assimilates 
them, the faith that succours itself by them, as by 
undergirdings of the ship when the waves are strong 
— that faith must be alive and active. Faith is an 
impulse of God within us ; and it must use these 
things and experience these things all for itself alone ; 
and only according to the use it makes of these 
arguments, and according to the measure of its own 
personal experience of what they are worth, will it 
find that they do anything at all to create the faith 
which they satisfy in others. 

This, then, is the first limitation With which we 
must approach these grounds, these evidences, these 
argumentative influences, which might lead us to 
believe in Jesus Christ. 

And now let us note another limitation. We 
are offering grounds of evidence for faith in Jesus 
Christ ; and faith in Jesus Christ has this broad 
character about it — that it always depends upon an 
earlier preliminary faith presupposed in the soul. 
Faith in Jesus Christ appeals to a belief which the 
soul already has — a belief assumed, a belief in God, 
a belief in goodness, a belief in a great Divine 
law about and abroad somewhere. That is the 
necessary temper which must be already in possession 
and already active before the faith in Jesus Christ 
can make its appeal. Faith in Jesus Christ is a faith 
which addresses itself to a believing soul ; it does not 
enter into all the arguments which could create this 
preliminary belief. If that belief be not there already, 
this faith in Jesus Christ will never come about ; but 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 65 

given that there is such a faith, and given that 
there is something in the soul that is looking out 
for a guide, that is feeling after a spiritual kingdom, 
that is aware of goodness and virtue in life and 
righteousness — given that, given these needs, given 
these movements, given these aspirations, then the 
faith in Jesus Christ says, "If you believe so much, 
you must go on to believe in Jesus Christ our Lord." 
That is the way the argument will always run. And 
let me just remind you how much our Lord Himself 
impressed this upon us. He always said that there 
must be preliminary conditions of faith already there 
before He could do anything at all: His mighty works 
presupposed that. One famous occasion I would recall 
to you in which our Lord is challenged to meet the 
very question that we are putting to-night — challenged 
in the Temple to say, " By what authority doest Thou 
these things, and who gave Thee this authority? 
Why are we to believe in these extraordinary 
assumptions You make?" He is facing the very 
question Himself. What did He do? He asked these 
people a preliminary question. " Before," He said, 
" I can meet your question, I will ask you a question 
Myself. The baptism of John — was it of heaven or 
of man ? " And they debated, we know, and they 
disputed this way and that, and discussed it, and 
finally they said that they had not made up their 
minds, they could not tell. And our Lord says, " Then 
neither tell I you by what authority I do these things." 
What did He mean ? He meant that it was perfectly 
useless for Him to speak of His authority or to tell 

5 



66 The Faith of Centuries. 

them anything about it, for they will not understand 
one word of it, unless they have already had a spiritual 
experience, and have passed under the baptism of 
John. They must have known already what it is 
to have a soul ; they must have known what it is to 
have recognised in that soul that they stand before a 
God who is a Judge, and that they have sinned ; they 
must have felt the power of the preacher who has 
convicted them of that sin, and has compelled them to 
go down to Jordan and confess their sin there and 
be baptised. If they have gone through that, if that 
spiritual experience is theirs, if they have been able 
already to believe so much, then they are in a position 
to hear the arguments by which Jesus Christ would 
justify His authority. But until that state of mind 
is there the way is blocked, the ears are stopped, 
and our Lord gives no answer at all and offers no 
argument. So always He told the Jews, " If you 
believe not Moses, how can you believe Me ? " And 
we know that tremendous text that is so startling 
to us at the end of the parable of Dives the rich 
man — the awful text which says, " If they believe not 
Moses and the Prophets, neither will they believe 
though one rose from the dead." Our Lord might 
die and rise again, but unless these souls had already 
felt the pressure of spiritual influence, felt the call to 
spiritual life conveyed to them through Moses and 
the Prophets, they would never believe though one 
rose from the dead. Always it is so. " If you were 
children of Abraham, you would believe in Me." 
First be children of Abraham, first have faith in the 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 67 

great God, first have a spiritual movement which 
constitutes you a pilgrim here on this earth, and 
then you will know what His words mean, then 
you will find yourself at last believing in Him. 
" My sheep hear My voice : ye then hear Me not, 
because ye are not My sheep." Everybody may 
be of the flock of Christ, — He does not limit it ; 
only He is stating a preliminary condition. They 
will only hear His voice by being already given of 
the Father to Him, under the movement of the 
Father, touched by the Father— that is a preliminary 
condition for every soul. And if every soul in the 
world were saved, still it would be true that "no 
man cometh unto Me unless God the Father draw 
him." It is not a limitation of the scope, but a 
statement of the conditions under which every 
soul comes to Jesus. 

This, then, is always supposed by our Lord Him- 
self. Grounds for belief in Christ presuppose that 
you have already found ground enough to believe 
in something ; and I think that this something in 
which men believe before they believe in Christ — 
this preliminary faith to which Christ appeals — can 
be divided into two main forms. 

Its first form is that which is conveyed in the 
great typical text of our Lord, "Believe in God, 
believe also in Me." The preliminary faith is faith 
in the great God — God „the Father, God the great 
Will and Power in life ; believe in that, have 
faith in that, then you shall be given grounds and 
arguments for going on from that faith to believe 



68 The Faith of Centuries. 

in Jesus Christ. That is one great form — believe 
in God, and out of your faith in God believe in 
Jesus Christ. 

Then there is another form of approach to Christ. 
You may have faith in man, may believe in his 
destiny, his hope — you may see grounds to trust 
him, and may see about him signs of a great 
heritage. You may have faith in his virtue, in his 
righteousness, in the truth that is in him ; and 
then the faith of Christ can say, " Well, that is 
a great thing ; if you have that faith in man, if you 
trust him, if you really do believe in righteousness 
and truth and purity, I will appeal to that faith 
in you, and I will give you grounds and evidences 
that, having that faith in man, you must go on to a 
faith in Jesus Christ, the true Man." Here will be two 
main lines of argument: (i) having faith in God, go on 
to believe in Jesus Christ ; or (2) having faith in man, 
go on to believe in Jesus Christ. I will take the first 
to-night — faith in God as a preliminary faith, which 
faith in Christ supposes to be already there ; and 
I would try and show you who have that faith, 
you who, I trust, are living by that faith, you 
who find that faith in difficulties, why, having such 
a faith, you must recognise grounds, evidences, 
arguments, which compel you to carry it out and 
to find yourselves believers in Jesus Christ our 
Lord. So let us try and see how these arguments 
will run. 

You believe in God ? Yes. That means you 
believe in a God who is real and alive. You do not 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 69 

mean, for instance, that you believe in some vague 
philosophical abstraction, a mere formula required as 
a first cause, a sort of hypothetical background for 
existence, a logical something far away without which 
the world of things and of nature could not have 
begun. You do not mean that you believe merely in 
a God who must be supposed a very long time ago 
to have made the world, and who then left it to go 
on by itself. Such a belief, no doubt, might remain 
stationary and blank, and might feel no necessity to 
go further and believe in Jesus Christ. I should say 
it was no faith in God at all. To believe in God at 
all is to believe in a living, energetic personal Will 
which is actively making and sustaining the world 
to-day as we see it — a God who is the centre and force 
of all our forces, who is the fount of life and the 
heart of life, and the moral and the spiritual spring 
of our being. Vigor tenax rerum. God is the 
inherent force that holds things together ; He is the 
Father of man, the vital necessity to the existence of 
men and women. He is alive, not in some remote 
bygone age of creation, but to-day — as in the 
beginning, so always, face to face with life to-day, the 
same yesterday and to-day and for ever. Faith in 
God could hardly claim the name if it fell short of 
this. It believes in an unchanging God who is ever 
face to face with the facts of to-day. 

But then the facts are ever changing. And by this 
perpetual change they make ever new demands upon 
God. Face to face with each changing fact, He can 
only remain the same, He can only retain His old 



70 The Faith of Centuries. 

identity, by taking new measures to meet new situa- 
tions. He must change His relationships to the facts 
as they move ; He must keep level with them as they 
advance, must lay Himself alongside with them ; only 
so can He verify the validity of His personality. A 
person is one who among all the shifting circumstances 
of life ever retains his own identity by perpetually 
adapting himself anew to circumstances as they come 
and go, so that through every change he remains ever 
the same. That is what we mean by calling man per- 
sonal. And God is a person ; God is one who is ever 
meeting the change of facts by a corresponding 
change in Himself, in order that He may retain His 
old identity in the face of new circumstances. As 
the situations shift, God shifts His relationship to the 
circumstances. He must ever be moving on to occupy 
new positions as new positions appear. We must 
believe in God as a Father who is keeping Himself 
in touch with history as it grows and changes and 
develops ; with man as he discloses himself ; with all 
the new needs and powers that have come to man. If 
God has not kept pace with these, kept Himself level 
with that new movement, then He has been left 
behind in the race, and does not stand where man 
stands to-day. But to believe in God the Father is 
to believe that He is at the side of His children, ever 
present as they disclose all these new powers. He 
must constantly be doing something for man and 
with man. Since those first days when the story 
began, there must be new acts of God going on. 
God must have done something more than create 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 71 

man and set him moving, or He would not be a living 
God. God must have disclosed Himself in order to 
keep level with the disclosure which man has been 
making in history. And this fresh disclosure of 
Himself is what we call Revelation. Revelation 
means something more than was involved merely in 
creation ; it means acts of God in addition to the 
old, by which. God has kept Himself in touch with 
the facts as they have come to be. 

And now let us ask what are the new and 
changed facts which history has disclosed ? Growth, 
development of capacity — this, of course, there has 
been. But with this other facts have appeared, 
alarming and critical. There has been sin, the 
awful shadow that haunts the development of 
man as it is disclosed in history ; and pain, the 
awful curse that still is entwined with this growth 
of man. Sin and pain — these are the ever-new facts 
which come out as the disclosure proceeds ; and God's 
disclosure then, as it moves along with the moving 
scene, must indicate the revelation of God's relation 
to these new facts of sin and suffering — His disposi- 
tion towards them, His handling of them, His remedy 
for them. He must be level with these terrible things. 
What is He going to make of them ? How is He 
going to preserve His own stainless Name in the face 
of sin, in the face of pain ? How is He going to 
manifest Himself the same eternal God, loving and 
gracious, in front of, and in the thick of, facts like 
these? Some change there must be,something He must 
have done. God's old action towards the sinless and 



72 The Faith of Centuries. 

untroubled earth cannot continue the same, now that 
sin has entered, now that suffering has begun. Is 
He to withdraw? That would be the one impossible 
thing, for God is the same yesterday, to-day, and for 
ever. He alone is the Upholder of life. A God 
who withdraws from the scene in disgust is a dead 
God, and no God at all. No ; to believe in God 
is to believe that He is here now — here .in a new 
and unhappy situation. What will He do? How 
will He adapt His purity and justice to the changed 
conditions ? 

Any belief in God, we see, must involve belief in a 
God who has done something in view of the bitter 
facts of sin and pain. And this argument for God 
having made some revelation of Himself gains new 
force with every year, with every century ; for year by 
year and day by day these terrible factors, sin and 
pain, give ever-fresh evidence of their sway — they 
disclose new power. The horror grows as we watch 
the evil spirit prevail over the new hopes and the new 
movements and the new aspirations ; and as the life 
becomes more high, as the development proceeds 
further, the fall is worse, the corruption is viler — hearts 
become more sick and heavy, and the road becomes 
ever more terrible and sad, and the scene is filled with 
yet more pitiful cries than before. And so we watch 
this great book unrolled of man's story that he writes 
himself — his history — a book so full of glorious 
promise, and yet written indeed within and without 
with lamentations and mournings and woes. And 
ever as this tale proceeds further the question 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 73 

becomes more and more urgent : Can it be that 
God has kept silent? Can it be that God has done 
nothing at all? Has He not shown what all this 
means to Him ? A living God, has He proved Him- 
self lifeless ? Has no hand been put out, no help, no 
hope been given, no pity shown, no purpose been 
disclosed, no new goal opened before man's eyes? 
Has there been no remedy ? What is the solution of 
this awful world of pain ? Is it to be just as if He 
had taken no measures, left it utterly alone, and never 
grappled with the tragedy of man ? A living God, 
and been silent ! A living God, and done nothing ! 
And more, He is the Father of His children. These 
are His children that are suffering, His children that 
are sinning, His children that are dying ; and has 
their Father given them no clue as to His intention, 
now that they have sinned? Has He never entered 
into their conflict? Has He never opened out the 
fountains of His pity ? A Father in face of suffering 
children who keeps silence ! Silence ! We all know 
the terror of such a silence when we look for help. 
In a shipwreck, the crash, the screams, the hubbub, 
the confusion— and then silence. The ship has sunk ; 
the great waters have passed over it. It is gone 
down into silence. It is this silence after a great 
disaster which makes the heart sick, and the 
blood cease to flow, and the perspiration of fear 
start in beads on the brow ; it is this silence which 
strikes panic into the soul. And has the world 
suffered this tremendous disaster, and has God kept 
silent ? Sin is still so strong, and suffering is still so 



74 The Faith ot Centuries. 

cruel ; and the great world that God made is so awful 
in its silence. The sun travels over the face of the 
sky in silence, the rivers pass in silence, the stars 
look on in silence ; and we sin and we suffer and we 
die, and the woods and the earth seem aware, seem as 
it were to look at us with conscious eyes y and yet they 
cannot speak. The dreadful silence of this created 
world to all those who have been touched by the misery 
of this long tragedy — that is the thing that chills the 
heart and strikes panic into the spirit ; and this is 
surely the reason why men are losing faith so largely. 
They look abroad, they see the sorrow, they know it, 
it touches them in their nearest and their dearest; 
and they are told to believe in God, and yet a God 
who has never spoken — to believe in God whilst this 
awful silence reigns round the disaster which is sweep- 
ing over the world. That is what they cannot do. 
" No, I cannot believe in God, if He is silent in face of 
London to-night." That is the refusal which explains 
why all belief in God that stops short of revelation 
is dying to-day — why what we call the old Deism of 
the last century cannot live. No people now can 
believe for long in a God who does not reveal how He 
proposes to deal with a situation that is so appalling. 
And therefore, outside our own Christian faith, we 
know that there is hardly anything left to-day except 
Agnosticism, which means the impossibility, the 
despair, of believing at all. More and more this is 
the challenge ringing out in men's ears : " If you 
would believe in God at all, if you would hold fast to 
that belief in a Father in heaven which is your life, 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 75 

then you must go further ; then you must move on 
and believe in a God who is alive to-day, and if alive, 
then a God who is at work, a God who is doing some- 
thing to meet the crises in which men find themselves. 
There must be a word of help that this God has 
spoken. He must have revealed His purpose to His 
children who sin and suffer and die. There is no 
believing in God without believing in a God who has 
revealed Himself." 

Where then has He revealed Himself? Where has 
He spoken ? I think, if ever men get so far as that, 
if ever, convinced that God must have spoken, they 
ask themselves, " Where has He said it," there can 
only be one answer possible. They will once more 
take up the old Book called the Bible. Here is the 
word that breaks the silence. Take that Book — it 
is quite alone in the world, whatever men may say — 
take it and compare it with any other book that 
claims to be a book of religion, and you will see that 
here, at least, is the one Book which speaks of God 
as moving along in history by the side of man ; of 
a God who discloses Himself according to the situation 
as it comes ; a God who century after century offers 
new words and new explanations and new interpre- 
tations to man, according to the changing life ; a 
God who goes on with man down his long story, 
is there by his side, whispering in his ear, and deals 
with this and that crisis when it comes ; a God of 
history ; a God of gradual revelation ; a God in the 
thick of the facts, recognising doubt, recognising sin, 
recognising sorrow, recognising pain, recognising 



76 The Faith of Centuries. 

death, and meeting all with His Word. You may 
discuss that Word, you may dispute its efficacy ; 
but it is a Word, and the other religions have no 
Word at all. They cannot tell of a God who has 
broken the silence, and has spoken ; of a God who 
walks by mans side, accompanying him down all his 
long story, supplying him with all those needs and 
succours that he wants at the moment ; a God of 
revelation, revealing Himself according to the measure 
with which man discloses himself in his acts and 
capacities, in his sins and sorrows. Here is a Book 
which at last meets the case. Here is a Book which 
says that God is no dead God, in a far-away world, who 
created man long ago, and has done nothing since. 
God is a friend ; God is a lover ; God walks close at 
our side ; He follows things as they occur ; He is here, 
patient with our patience, sorrowing with our sorrow, 
uffering with our suffering — yea, and at last dying 
with our death. Here is a God who says what He 
proposes to do with the situation which so alarms 
us. Here is a God who at least has a mind about 
what pain and suffering and sin may do. Here is 
the word spoken which breaks the silence, which 
dissolves the panic. Here is the loud cry of a 
God who is begging and beseeching His children 
to hold fast by Him, though the night be dark, 
though sorrow be sad, though death be hard. 
He knows it all ; He feels it all ; He recognises the 
alarms and the perils and the great fear that is 
before them, and yet He cries to them, " Oh that 
My children would hearken unto Me!" Here is a 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 77 

God who speaks when silence would be intolerable. 
And it is not only a Book in which He speaks, 
but that Book tells of the Word of the Lord, who 
will stand at last on this earth, whose voice shall 
break the silence — Jesus Christ, who is the Word of 
God. He is the Word we want, the Word delivered 
and disclosed, who in His own person will reveal how 
it is that God means the world to continue as it is, 
how it is that He proposes to handle it, what He will 
make in His pity and love out of souls that have 
sinned, out of souls that know indeed that they must 
suffer for their sins, but who yet, by holding on to 
God and to Jesus Christ, can find that there is a 
way which God has opened out for them, by which, 
in spite of the sin, and through the suffering, and 
right through the darkness of death, they may yet 
pass into that blessed home where they will be 
gathered as children of their Father in heaven. 

That is the argument, I think, in its breadth for 
believing in Jesus Christ. Believe in God — that first. 
Believe in Him as alive ; believe that He must there- 
fore, being alive, have shown how He is at work 
to-day in the world such as we know it too well in 
London. Believe in a God who has acted and spoken 
in face of the terrors that are about us ; a God who 
has made it known to us that His pity and His 
righteousness and His love are stronger than sorrow, 
and stronger than suffering, and stronger than death ; 
a God who has come here and Himself taken His 
stand by man, has known his sorrow, has shared all 
his woes, has taken upon Himself all his pains, has 



78 The Faith of Centuries. 

sent His own Son to bear His cross and win His 
crown. Believe in God. Believe in a God who has 
spoken Believe in the Word, the one Word that He 
has spoken, that avails in face of the facts as you 
know them in their urgency, in their terror. Believe 
in Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God. Amen. 

Henry Scott Holland, 



V. 

Ifaitb in 3e$u$ Cbrtet. 

WE are to speak once more of these grounds 
that we have for belief in Jesus Christ ; and 
these grounds, we say, are so deep and so strong 
because they run far back into those primal faiths 
with which man starts on his career. There are pre- 
liminary beliefs without which man is not man ; there 
are in him tendencies, inclinations to belief which are 
vital, which are essential to his advance ; and it is to 
these that Christ makes His appeal. He enters the 
world appealing to what is already there, coming to 
rescue and to fulfil that which man already holds deep 
down in his heart. 

And this attitude of the Lord is no position in- 
vented for Him by His apologists, but is due to 
the historical facts of His coming. Our Lord Jesus 
Christ comes late into the world — comes to the world 
far on in its development ; and there is a long story, 
before He arrives, of hopes and fears and joys and 
defeats, all of which have built up this process of 
man's history. Old experiences going far back into 
the earliest years, old hopes that have been there and 



80 The Faith of Centuries. 

have become tangled and perplexed — these have con- 
tinued century after century, and still God waits for 
the moment at which they will be ready for their 
solution. These hopes are presupposed by the Lord ; 
these perplexities must have been already experienced 
and become part of the feeling and thought of man 
before Christ enters and can be understood. And so 
this had been the Christian argument from the very 
first. All primitive beliefs, they said, tend to Jesus 
Christ, and all the goodness that has been in the 
world before Him is working, as we hold, towards 
Him who shall come. The good impulses are waiting 
for their revelation and their completion in Him who 
claims to carry forward that which man has hoped to 
do, and yet cannot do. All is working out towards 
this one fulfilment ; all has been presupposed by the 
Christ ; all is there already for Him to lay hands 
upon it, and to draw it out, and to free it from all 
that encumbers it, and to make it aware of that which 
it really intended. So, wherever in the world a man 
believes in anything good and high and holy, wherever 
there has been a man in all the heathen races feeling 
after a God, there has been a man to whom Christ 
makes His appeal ; and He makes His appeal to 
him as He did to the centurion in the Acts, because 
already there is something there which has been 
going up before God, because already there have been 
experiences which will enable the man to understand 
why it is that at last there stands on the earth One 
who says, " I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." 
Christianity said this from the very first ; it always 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 8r 

supposed that there had been what it called a prepara- 
tion for the Christ who only comes in the fulfilment 
of times. And let us therefore all remember that 
Christianity was eighteen hundred years ahead of 
human knowledge in discovering the doctrine of 
evolution — i.e. of the gradual growth of the Divine 
purpose. All that we have learned so much of in 
these later days from Darwin and others is already 
in the Bible long ago ; and Christianity was the first 
force in the world that brought it out, and showed 
how God works bit by bit — first the blade, then the 
ear, then the full corn in the ear. So, in many ways, 
and in many manners, and in varying degrees, God 
reveals His Word by stages, line by line, precept 
upon precept ; and still there is development, and still 
there is evolution, and still the seed grows and the 
bud ripens into flower and into fruit, and at the end 
He arrives who completes the whole and carries 
forward the evolution to its consummation. So it 
was said by every apostle in the Bible ; so by 
St. Peter in the Acts ; so, over and over again, by 
St. Paul in his Epistles ; so again by the writer of 
the Hebrews. Christ follows on that which has gone 
before — that is the first position of Christianity. And 
the argument, therefore, that it always uses is, " Believe 
in what you have, believe in what you know, believe 
in what is good, believe in the highest that is in you, 
and you are on your way to believe — nay, you must 
go on to believe — in Jesus Christ, who alone completes 
it." So we showed in the last lecture that if you 
believed in God, then you must move forward step by 

6 



82 The Faith of Centuries. 

step, until the process ends in your delivering yourself 
up into the arms of Jesus Christ. And now, to-night, 
I will ask you to take another line of advance, and I 
say, " Believe in man, in what is good in him, in what 
is alive in him, in what grows in him, and in what 
aspires in him — believe in man, believe man to be 
what he declares himself to be ; and then you will find 
yourself moving on, point by point, until at last your 
belief closes in Jesus Christ, the Son of Man." 

Let us see how this will work as an argument. 
Believe in man— that is, believe in his possibilities, in 
his gifts, in his capacities, in his growth ; believe in 
the reality of man, believe in the real significance of 
that which he discloses. To believe in man means to 
believe in him as a growing, living thing. Now this 
is a serious belief, if you come to press it ; for it 
means that you must believe in man, not with the 
temper of a mere spectator looking on at a mass of 
men, as if they were a mere scientific class, a mere 
type, a generalised genus called Man, in the mass. 
Man cannot be known in that way at all. Every 
man has one peculiarity which singles him out from 
everything else in Nature, and this is his speciality, his 
significance, which makes you name him Man ; and 
to believe in man is to believe in that which is 
significant of his peculiarity, that which is his 
characteristic, which distinguishes him from every- 
thing else about him, so that you give him a separate 
name. And when you ask what that is, you have 
only one answer. Man is a person. Man is not 
to be known in the mass as a generalised class, as 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 83 

science would survey him. Man is only known as 
man through that characteristic which we call his 
identity, his individuality — that which makes every 
single, separate man quite distinct to himself alone. 
That is the heart of the matter ; in that lies everything 
that makes him interesting ; in that alone is he 
himself. Therefore to believe in man is to believe in 
the personality of man — to believe that that is his 
essential characteristic, his root reality. He is never 
a mere specimen; but each is individualised, a separate 
centre of interest, a distinct identity, a spiritual being, 
living with a personal will. That is man himself, to 
which all else is accidental and subordinate ; and so 
any one who declares, " I believe in man," means, " I 
propose to believe in his individuality ; and I cannot 
do that unless I am willing to enter it from inside, to 
see with that man's eyes, to place myself at the core 
of his person, there where he is a drama to himself, 
there where is his soul, the personal will round which 
everything turns." So you enter in — you look in. 
" I believe in man. What is this man ? Let me get 
inside him. Let me know him in his individual 
character." And when once you have done that with 
sympathy, with love, what a wonderful world it is 
that you find inside each man ! There you find a 
drama going on within each soul which is that soul's 
own story, and no one else's in all the wide world. A 
drama — that is the only word by which we can call it. 
And such a drama ! We watch there feelings collid- 
ing one with another ; and the will with the feelings ; 
and the joys, pains, and sorrows ; and all the mingling 



84 The Faith of Centuries. 

experiences that come and go ; and all the moments 
that pass, each with its impulse and with its incentive; 
and yet the person, the individuality, the man, press- 
ing forward through it all and using all for his own 
purposes — growing, developing, displaying that which 
he is. Through each instant his character comes out 
■ — what he peculiarly, distinctly is, and what no one 
else in the world can be. He grows as a moral 
character, and his life is a drama in which his moral 
character is disclosed. He does not know, himself, 
what it is going to be — he could not tell beforehand ; 
but as each circumstance turns up and presses upon 
him and forces him to act and speak, out comes the 
word, out comes the deed, and he is revealed as the 
man who could alone have said that word or done 
that particular deed at that particular moment. We 
know him now — we know what he is ; and he knows 
himself. And so we watch him ; and he watches his 
own drama, his own character, coming out into the 
open, showing itself abroad. We call it a drama, not 
a growth, because as we watch ourselves or watch 
another it is only too clear that the man's own will 
plays a part in it, his own intention, his own purpose, 
his own watchfulness, his own reasoning, his own 
strength. These belong to the drama ; on these it 
depends how he will use the circumstances that come 
up before him. He is the agent ; he recognises his 
own responsibility for that which he becomes under 
the pressure of circumstances. He may be idle or he 
may be watchful, he may be reckless or he may be 
prudent, but it is himself that comes out, his own will 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 85 

playing a part in the development of the character, so 
that we cannot tell, nor can he, what it will become, 
as we can in the growth of a flower or a plant. He 
himself is always alive in the action, always himself 
an agent in the drama ; and this forms the intense 
interest of his life. Here is his real significance — that 
he grows, and not only that, but that he grows 
through himself, that he is one of the agents in that 
growth, taking part in his own growth, putting force 
into it by his own will. His character is built up out 
of the acts of will which he enacts in face of circum- 
stances ; so that he himself is engaged, according to 
his measure, in the action of creating that which he 
becomes. This is what constitutes the fascination of 
man — that he helps to build up his moral character 
himself. And here lie all the heights and depths 
of this passionate play that we are watching, — 
here are the great lights that play so high on 
the summit of his life ; here lie the great pits of 
darkness that are there, the great shadows that fall. 
By his power to freely will what he shall become 
under the pressure of circumstance, he is as one 
hung between heaven and hell, whom we can watch 
as he makes his choice, and discloses that which he 
chooses to become. And still he moves between all 
these perilous possibilities, and still he is always dis- 
closing either that which is fair and gracious and pure, 
or revealing in himself depths of wickedness which 
neither he nor any other had conceived possible. So 
the interest in man becomes intense and absorbing ; 
and when anybody says, " I believe in man," he means, 



86 The Faith of Centuries. 

" I believe in that moral drama going on in each 
man's soul ; I believe that there lies the key of what 
man is ; I believe that this is the fascination of his 
life. I cannot take my eyes off this royal progress, 
this spectacle for men and angels, as the man moves 
along, and there are decisions and crises ; and still 
the drama grows more varied, more complete, more 
strange ; and still the man discloses all the great 
spiritual powers that are his destiny, and to which he 
is susceptible." 

To believe in man is to believe in the reality of this 
drama. And here let us give our thanks to those 
great writers who assist us in our task of believing in 
that inner drama which makes the significance of 
man ; because we know how, living in these vast 
cities of ours, the deadening weight of numbers 
almost compels us to think of men in masses, to drop 
out their separate individual value ; and we should 
be crushed by the deadening multitude if it were not 
that great literary authors devote all their energies 
to keeping alive in us the influence of this significant 
drama which is going on in individual souls. 

We owe our thanks, above all, to the novelists and 
the poets, (i) The novelists who have been so great 
in our particular generation have been those who have 
forced our attention upon the importance and the 
value and the special significance of individual 
character as it grows. The great novel breaks up all 
broad classifications of man, all scientific generalisa- 
tions, and it asserts that all passions are necessarily 
individual in their interest, and that each soul has a 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 87 

plot of its own, and a development of its own, and a 
little world of its own in which it moves, and a story 
of its own, and a goal of its own, and that it is the 
pivot of separate crises, and has a claim to fulfil itself 
and the right to achieve its own development. Each 
boy and girl that love one another in a novel love 
one another as if they and they only had ever loved 
in all the world, as if it was quite a new moment in 
the world's history that they should have found one 
another. The novel exists to assert : " Here is a 
brand-new story ; it is a love story, but it is quite 
new for all that, because every soul has a new story 
of its own, and has a new love that has never been 
felt before ; and such a story is well worth the telling. 
Come, and read, and forget all else. It is the old 
story, yet it can never grow old, for always it renews 
its youth, as it is reborn in each fresh particular soul. 
Nothing can make stale its infinite variety." This is 
how the novelists can help us, if they sustain our 
interest in the personal drama of each single life, and 
say, " Never believe in what you call masses ; every- 
body has a distinct story, everybody is interesting, if 
you knew their story." (2) So, too, the great poets 
of our day, the great prophets, are the people who, 
in face of all the vast mechanical development of the 
age, have thundered out still their belief in man's 
individuality, have sustained our belief in man. 
Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, and above all Browning ; 
for Robert Browning set himself to do this very 
thing of which we speak, and to assert that every- 
where there is only one thing interesting in the world, 



88 The Faith of Centuries. 

and that is the individuality of man. Wherever you 
find it, however common its circumstances, however 
coarse its environments, however commonplace it 
looks to you ; yes, even if it be horribly evil ; it 
appeals to you notwithstanding, because it is the 
expression of a man, a soul, a separate individual. In 
this lies its absorbing interest. It may be the basest 
murderer in the world ; still you shall see that here 
is a man with a growth of his own and issues of his 
own ; and he himself is playing his part by his own 
will in the midst of good or evil circumstances, work- 
ing out his career, fascinating you and absorbing 
you, thrilling you simply with the fact that he gives 
you the story of a soul. Thus it is that the great 
poets, and the great novelists, have sustained our 
interest in the individual story of man, and said, " See 
here where man is himself; believe in man, believe 
in his individuality, believe in the reality of his per- 
sonal life, believe in his moral character ; that is where 
he is interesting, for that is where he is real." 

And now, when we have got as far as this, there is 
a great misadventure ; for the more interested we 
become in the plot of man's life — in watching its 
development, its personal growth — the more necessary 
it becomes that this plot should have a conclusion, 
that this drama should have a unity, should fulfil 
itself, should work itself out. This world of growing 
interests, so rich, so varied, so precious, that we find 
inside the personal soul, must end somewhere, must 
move towards some purpose ; and it is just here that 
we are met by a most terrible breakdown ; for we find 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 89 

that the stage on which this drama is worked out is 
so terribly small, the time so deplorably brief, that 
hardly any story arrives at its conclusion at all here 
on earth. The play and counter-play of each indi- 
vidual life find no scope here in the allotted time 
permitted, in this contemptible sphere of existence, 
between the cradle and the grave. We see powers 
and capacities in a man which we know to be there, 
and yet they are always behind the scenes, and there 
is never an opportunity for them to come on the 
stage ; they lie fallow, unused. And in our crowded 
metropolitan city this is surely the saddest sight 
that we see. All about us are the spiritual powers 
that await fulfilment; and yet in the press and storm 
of life, and the hurry and the work, there is no 
time and no place for the drama of the heart, for 
the development of the soul. Think of all the weary 
rows of tiny boxes in which men live here in London, 
and review them all, and think of the capacities 
and feelings that are there, and all choked and all 
thwarted, all occupied in getting their daily bread, 
with no time and no opportunity to grow, kept 
waiting behind the scenes ! 

And then there are those to whom opportunities 
do come of working out their drama, of developing 
their personal character — those who have had a little 
time to draw out this inner world of the soul ; yet 
how broken, how tangled, the real issue ! Do we call 
it a drama ? It is hardly more than a bad rehearsal 
of the first act — just a suggestion of what a man 
might be and might do — just the tentative trial of his 



90 The Faith of Centuries. 

powers by which he has learned what he could have 
done if he had not blundered : that is about what a 
man achieves. And then, if and when he has begun 
anything at all, it may in a moment be ruined 
by an accident, by a mistake ; this experiment in 
passion, in emotion, in resolution, is broken off 
short. If he could only begin again — if he could 
have a little more time — if he were not snared 
in a pitfall just as he was becoming so good, so 
gracious ! — that is what we are always saying. We 
see such efforts spent on so little — such waste, such 
aimlessness, such blundering ! 

And then, above all, there is what we have spoken 
of — the strange accident death : death, that ignores 
the plot — death, that spoils the play just in the midst 
of its development, just as the interest intensifies, 
just as the individual begins to find his powers, and 
we can recognise that he is at last going to find what 
he had missed, and to prove and realise his true self ; 
then it is that death plucks him off the stage, hurries 
him off in the thick of the business ; he disappears, 
and is seen no more. All those threads so carefully 
woven are now so swiftly snapped. 

Death plays havoc with our human drama. Death 
the thief, death the murderer — when is it the most 
cruel ? Is it when it snatches off the young life that 
is charged with infinite meaning, at the moment when 
all is just coming to flower? A cold, a chill, strikes 
it ; it is all over, gone to nothing. Or is it yet 
more desperate when it comes to an old man, fair 
and honourable in life, with the stored-up experience 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 91 

of an accumulated wisdom — when at last he has 
his gifts in hand, and is able to advise and judge 
and select and decide — when at last he has won 
out of his life the power to act, the power to think, 
the power to judge? And just as his gifts are at 
their ripest, just as he has won the prize, just when 
he is really prepared to give his services, tempered 
and disciplined and chastened by the experience of 
life, for the good of his fellow-men— just then he is 
swept away ; death wrecks the work of years, and 
lays its honour in the dust. Such is death, carrying 
off the best, leaving the worst — death always work- 
ing, as far as we see it, so blindly, so irrationally, so 
cruelly, so needlessly. This wonderful drama of the 
individual personal life into which we throw our 
hearts and our souls is thrown into helpless disorder 
by this ambuscade of death ; and all human life — this 
personal human life, the life which makes man what 
he is — becomes wholly dislocated and wholly irra- 
tional, if death is the end. 

Now at this point begins the crisis in men's lives, 
when they recognise for the first time the contrast 
between the gifts that they see in men and women 
and the brief imperfect opportunity which these have 
of using them. Such a recognition involves a critical 
recoil ; and we are tempted to relinquish that primal 
belief in man with which we started. We are inclined 
to judge men, not by the splendour of their capacities, 
but by their contemptible and sterile exit. We cannot 
believe in the goodness and the fairness of gifts that 
terminate so deplorably. So flimsy, so contemptible, 



92 The Faith of Centuries. 

a thing is this man ! Why has he imagined that 
he is going to do great things? All he does has 
to die. It is but a deceit and a delusion that there 
is any value in his personal will. How can it be of 
value, when he has no control over it, when at any 
moment, by some miserable hazard, it is broken off 
short and goes down into the grave ? How can we 
believe in man ? That is the recoil — the recoil of the 
cynic, the recoil of bitterness, the disappointment at 
that which had looked so fair at the start and that 
ends so pitifully. We discount man, we belittle man, 
we scoff down all his hopes and aspirations that offer 
so much. This moral character of his — what is it 
worth, what can it count? Man with his honour is 
compared with the beasts that perish, which all go 
down one way ; he cometh up as the grass, and is cut 
down as the flower, and the wind bloweth over it, and 
the place thereof knoweth it no more, and it is gone. 
Bitter cries of despair and disgust come all too eagerly 
to our lips. 

Fill the can and fill the cup ! 

All the windy ways of men 
Are but dust that rises up, 

And is lightly laid again ! 

All go unto one place, all are but dust, and all turn 
to dust again. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity ! 

That is the temptation ; it is a temptation, you see, 
to relinquish your belief in man. You had belief in 
man, you thought he was going to do such things ; 
you had thrown your heart into this drama, and you 
have given it up. And now the cry of Christ, the cry 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 93 

of our religion, to you is, " This is the moment, the 
supreme moment, at which you are asked to cling 
tight and fast to that primal belief with which you 
start. Believe in man, in that which you saw to be 
so good, so interesting, so honourable, in man ; believe 
man's own report of himself; believe that which his 
faculties, his conscience, his will, his love, his desire, 
declare ! They declare that they are valid and 
precious, that they are stored with treasures, that they 
are full of purpose, that they make for high goals. 
Well ! Accept their verdict ! Believe in what they 
declare about themselves. Believe in the judgment 
man passes on himself; believe in the natural judgment 
of your own heart when it is sound ; rely upon it that 
it is impossible that man should have advanced so far 
as he has by the power of self-deception." Do you 
say that man has deceived himself by forming so high 
an estimate of himself and of his inner life, that he 
is the victim of self-deception, and that he has imagined 
it all ? Well, I answer that, if man can so deceive 
himself, then the fact that he can so deceive himself 
is by far the most interesting fact about him. He 
alone deceives himself in this world of nature. Who 
is this being that can invent a career for himself? 
Who is this being that lives in the power of self- 
delusion, who can create a life, who can make a 
character, by force of imagination? Surely this is 
the strangest sight on earth ! Surely this is the one 
sight upon which all your attention ought to be fixed 
— a man who can deceive himself so that self-deceit 
is the highest power in him ! If it be self-deceit, 



94 The Faith of Centuries. 

turn and see how it is that man has the power to be 
the victim of his own self-delusions. And if by this 
road you find yourself tangled in a hopeless dilemma, 
then take the other road. Return to your belief in 
what man, in spite of circumstances and in the face 
of death, inwardly declares himself to be. Believe 
that the secret of all his interest lies in the develop- 
ment of his moral character, in the process of his 
personal life ; and then, so believing, you must go on 
to believe further — you must say what interpretation 
you are going to give to this drama which ends so 
strangely. 

How will you interpret it ? Who can help you to 
an interpretation? Well, turn first to the highest 
examples of men ? You say you believe in men, in 
the goodness of men, in that which they show them- 
selves capable of being ; turn then and ask what the 
best men think on this matter, what interpretation 
they give of their lives. What do they say about this 
death that ends the drama, and throws all into dis- 
order? With one voice, if you turn to the highest 
and best men, they say that the drama is worth every- 
thing, and death counts for nothing. The drama, the 
personal drama, the character, is that sole thing which 
is of value in their lives ; and as for death, they refuse 
to regard it. There must be something after death, 
or their life has no meaning. But they have assumed 
that their life has a meaning. It claims it by its 
growth, it proves it by its judgment on itself; there 
must be something towards which it aims, and death 
cannot rob it of that goal towards which it is set. 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 95 

So all the best and all the highest have said either 
in words and in actual belief, or else said it by their 
lives. They did not all know what they believed ; 
they could not all profess it ; but, notwithstanding, 
they all lived a life which counted on there being 
no death — a life which went out beyond the horizon 
terminated by death. There is no instance of any 
man who has risen to any eminence or has shown 
any high character who has not so shaped his life 
that it might reach out beyond the bounds of earth ; 
who has not disregarded the fact that at any moment 
he might die and all would be over. He has lived 
a life in spite of death, in disregard of death; he 
has counted on not dying. He has risked it all on 
the throw, whether he believed in that larger life 
or whether he did not. His life, if it were high, if 
it were honourable, has always been a stake laid 
down on the condition that life goes beyond the 
horizon of the earth, and that death cannot defeat it. 
No man who has cut down his view of life actually to 
the earth about him and to the horizon of the earth 
has found himself enabled to develop a strong and 
a high character. So all men of character, all men 
with any height and nobility in their character, have 
lived lives which cannot be explained by the conditions 
within which they actually lived. So they all have 
said in words or by their lives. And as we look them 
round, and as we review them, and as we ask them 
for their solution and for their interpretation, and 
as we turn to the best and highest, and yet find 
that they are confused in their interpretations, and 



96 The Faith of Centuries. 

contradict one another, and have flaws here and there 
that make us a little distrust their judgment, and have 
blundered in a way which shows they are infirm; still, 
out of the crowd even of the best, out of the few who 
form the best of the best, there must rise the figure of 
One supreme, of One who stands out among the best 
who have ever been, with incorruptible goodness, with 
perfect purity of intention, with a strange simplicity 
about Him. Surely here at last is One whose instincts 
cannot be at fault ; surely, if we believe in man, we 
believe in the goodness that is within man, we believe 
in virtue where we find it ; and here is virtue — we 
must believe in it ; and here is holiness — we must 
trust it ! Surely here is One who cannot have been 
deceived ! And as we look at Him as He stands out 
above the best, supreme among the few, so too we 
find Him to be sure in His judgments, to be calm 
and secure where others are perplexed. He is never 
at fault, and is distressed by no accident, and is per- 
turbed by no disorder, but always has His eyes calmly 
fixed on some goal which He still sees, some aim 
which He still can pursue ; He is always true to 
Himself, He is always ready to declare why He is 
there. What is this calmness, this security of judg- 
ment, in Him who stands out as the holiest and best 
of men? Does He know what He says that He 
knows ? He seems to look through and pronounce 
upon these things. Is He deceiving Himself when 
He declares what He sees? If so, here is the holiest 
and best of men who has been most deceived. Here 
is a man who has carried character highest, and yet 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 97 

He is the worst and darkest victim of self-deception. 
Surely to believe in man at all, to believe in his 
moral reality, makes it impossible to believe that One 
so sound, so strong, so pure, so righteous, should be 
the victim of self-delusion so profound. No : if we 
believe in man, if we believe in the goodness of man, 
we must believe in the goodness of Christ Jesus. If 
we believe He is good, He cannot be wholly self- 
deceived in the judgments He delivers. " Which of 
you," He says, "convinces Me of sin ? Do you find 
anything wrong, any flaw, anything that can disturb 
or distort My judgment ; and if you cannot, why do 
you not believe in Me ? " 

To believe in man is to be challenged at last 
to believe in this Man, the Son of Man, who stands 
out there as the supreme expression of what man is. 
Turn to Him and ask what is His interpretation of 
life. What does He declare? 

He declares, first, that this life drama, this inner 
story of the soul, with which we began, which we 
felt to be the most real thing in man, and the only 
thing which was significant and precious, is indeed 
the one and only thing which makes man what he is ; 
and He carries forward that life drama yet further, 
and heightens it and intensifies it and enriches it, so 
that since He has stood on the earth this drama of 
the personal will has become the one absorbing interest 
of the soul. Here, He says, is indeed the scene on 
which great issues are enacted ; here is the great 
arena on which the battle is fought ; and all heaven 
and all hell are watching you in this drama, which 

7 



g8 The Faith of Centuries. 

you are right in thinking so fascinating and absorbing. 
So He asserts. 

And then in face of death He declares that He is 
Lord over death, and that death is not the end of this 
life drama ; that it lasts beyond, and will see its con- 
clusion ; that it will be found to have an issue ; that 
all this great growth and development of character 
moves on towards an end which God will bring to 
pass. And in order to carry conviction to our souls 
that this is true, He Himself suffers the whole drama 
of His own life to be shattered into pieces at the 
very start. He allows all His work which was 
growing to be broken before His eyes. He stands 
there in His youth, full of promise and full of 
hope, with everything before Him ; and down the 
whole thing falls in fragments, shattered into ruins, 
goes down to death and destruction. He stands 
there with this drama broken off short, before it has 
reached any purpose ; and still declares it is all safe, 
it is all held fast, it is all in the great purpose of 
God. He sees, He knows, He is sure ; His eyes have 
reached there ; all is held : the drama moves on to 
its conclusion ; the plot is not broken ; God will see 
to the close. So He stands, triumphant amid the 
utter wreck of His earthly life, to convince all those 
who find their lives in ruins that they too shall see 
the end, since He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. 

That is the challenge of Jesus Christ ; and I cannot 
but think it worth while to recall its form at a 
moment such as that in which we stand, when belief 
in Jesus Christ and in God is so terribly shaken. 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 99 

We should go behind this alarming fact, and see in it 
the symptom of an inward wrong. And if we did 
this, we should detect the failure of man to believe in 
himself, which is sapping his capacity for all belief. 
Man's belief in his own significance, in his own destiny, 
has suffered eclipse. This is the secret source of his 
impotence. For if this belief in himself is weak, then 
it is natural enough that he should be unable to believe 
in God sending His Christ to come to the rescue of 
that belief in his own dignity and worth which he 
ought to have, but which he has lost. 

1. There are many reasons, I think, why man 
should be losing belief in himself. Those great 
prophets of literature of whom we spoke, and who 
have sustained our belief in this personal drama of 
the soul, are now all dead or dying, and there seems 
to be no one to take their places. The Carlyles and 
the Ruskins and the Tennysons and the Brownings 
have gone ; and the people who now speak to us in 
our literature are smaller men who seem only to 
be able to make experiments in verse or prose ; they 
carry us but a very little way ; and none of them seem 
to have any grasp of life, none of them seem to 
have any particular message to give, and many of 
them are sad and morbid and give us no assistance at 
all. So it is that the sustaining and inspiring force 
which came to us through literature has been with- 
drawn during the last ten years. 

2. And then there has been the great disillusion 
of science. Thirty years ago we all thought that 
science had a revelation to make. It seemed so 



ioo The Faith of Centuries. 

amazing, so immense, so infinitely hopeful ; every- 
thing else might go by the board, but still there would 
be this wonderful power of natural science with 
positive results reading out real conclusions that we 
could trust ; and there was a general sense of uplifted 
joy that at last there was an organ for real truth, 
which would show man what he was, and what his 
life was meant to be, how he should guide it, and 
what was its conclusion. And now we know that 
science will tell us nothing of the sort. It is not 
going to touch that inner life of which we have spoken. 
It will give us a hint here and there, but it has 
nothing directly to tell us of the personal life. And 
more and more we have learned its rigid limitations, 
and more and more we can see that it is no guide at 
all on these great issues, these momentous questions, 
on which the life drama turns. And science confesses 
it now, and knows it, and tells us, " I am agnostic — 
that is, I do not know. I am very sorry I do not 
know; I thought I should know, but I do not." And 
that has been a great disappointment ; and I think 
the weariness of that disappointment is telling all 
round. 

3. And then, of course, there has been the with- 
drawal of those primal assumptions about the value 
of life and the real meaning of life which we used to 
inherit from our fathers and which we never questioned. 
We believed in the moral law ; we believed in the 
essence of spiritual life ; we believed we were meant 
to be religious : all these things were taken for 
granted, and men might assume them in conversation 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 101 

one with another as things-of-course, and the man 
would be considered an idiot who disputed them. But 
now we know that everything is in dispute, and that 
nothing can be assumed between man and man, and 
everything has to be proved. And yet we find that 
the deep assumptions of life, the real grounds upon 
which life rests, can never be proved — they are 
beyond all proof. They only verify themselves in 
action ; by being believed in, and by then discovering 
their proofs. You must have already had some 
experience in believing them in order to find their 
proofs. These great deep assumptions which sustain 
life have lost their original authority over us ; and so 
through the pitifulness of the withdrawal of all in- 
spiration from literature, and through the disillusion of 
science, and through the loss of the great old assump- 
tions upon which life was held to rest, men, and, 
above all, educated men, have recoiled into a great 
despair. There is a profound disbelief among the 
educated classes in there being any reality or 
significance in life at all ; and a general sense that 
we are but little things who creep and crawl, who 
are making a pretence to be very busy in a world 
and in a life which have very little meaning in them, 
and of which the end is death — vanity of vanities. 
And there is a special fear which is on my mind 
just now, lest man should also lose belief in himself 
by losing belief in that great social movement 
which is so much in our hearts. The educated classes 
have already felt the shock of disillusion ; but still 
the " masses " are stirred by the great movement of 



io2 The Faith of Centuries. 

social sympathy, social hope, which is quickening 
men's consciences to give them larger desires, and to 
encourage them to make richer demands on life, and 
to see a higher value in themselves and in others. A 
mighty impulse lifts man to look for a new day, a 
better day, that shall dawn on this earth with some- 
thing of light and splendour upon it such as has not 
been before. Now this impulse witnesses to man's 
true belief in himself, in his destiny, in the purpose 
and the reality of life ; but it brings with it a great 
anxiety. For that task is a very big one, of bringing 
in this new day ; and the advance is very slow. There 
will be many a blunder made before it comes, and 
many a rebuff and defeat will have to be endured, 
and again and again man will feel, " Oh the great 
hope I had, and how little it has attained ! I 
dreamed of a new earth ; I dreamed of a happier 
place for men to live in ; and perhaps even yet, when 
I am dead and gone, my children's children may 
be there to see the first gleam of such a day come 
in ; but I shall never see it here ! " And as that 
begins to dawn upon men, as long delays wear them 
out, as miserable defeats come and go, will they bear 
it, ? They will never bear it, they will never bravely 
face it, if their outlook is bounded by death, if their 
faith is only a faith of earth, and if they look only for 
an earthly promise. If their thought be materialistic, 
or agnostic, without any higher faith in it at all, then 
they will never face their task, they will never endure 
the awful anxieties thrown upon them. It will be 
impossible to sustain high hopes for men who all 



Faith in Jesus Christ. 103 

perish so fast, who die as flies die, who come to-day 
and are gone to-morrow, who go down into the pit 
and death gnaweth upon them. No : in such frailty- 
is no sign of victory ; human life appears only as 
something blinded, something futile, silly, without a 
purpose, without an aim. How can we work for such 
fleeting vanities? What can we hope for perishing 
humanity ? Our ideals will never dawn, our hopes 
will never be realised ! So men will wail out the old 
cry ; and they will recoil, and there will be the bitter 
madness of disappointment, and the sickness of hope 
deferred, and all the pain of disillusion. 

To work for man, to hope for man, we must 
believe in him ; and we shall be unable to believe in 
him unless we can believe in something more than 
him — unless that belief in him with which we 
start, in which we set out, can be caught up just as 
it falls and faints, caught up by a stronger Hand, 
lifted up by an everlasting Will — unless we can hear 
the loving Voice which says, " You men may die, but 
I endure ; I did die, but I am alive again ; I am 
Alpha and Omega ; I hold in My hand the keys of 
life and death ; I will make all good ; I will carry 
forward the work which you must drop ; I am the 
pledge, I am the witness, I am the assurance, that 
victory yet will dawn ; the day you have dreamed 
of will come — will come here on earth through Me, 
who am King of kings and Lord of lords. Nor 
will you be lost and vanished away into dust and 
ashes, for you will be alive in Me at that day, in My 
Body and in My kingdom." That is the voice with 



104 The Faith of Centuries. 

which Jesus Christ greets this hope of man for 
himself, which is now stirring us, amid its unavoidable 
delays, defeats, falls, and sufferings. That is the 
challenge that rings in our ears. You believe in 
man ; you believe that a better day can dawn. 
Believe it : you are right. And, so believing, lift 
your eyes to Him, the One Man in whom you can 
retain this invincible belief in humanity. Men — poor, 
broken, failing men — they will always disappoint ; 
they will always break your hearts. Yes, you will 
break your own heart, you will disappoint yourself. 
But the Man Christ Jesus, deathless, stainless, un- 
tainted by failure and untouched by wrong, will rally 
again and again all those fallen aspirations which 
men's sins have broken ; He and He alone in His 
invincible power will rally them to the great cause 
of unconquerable Faith. Believe in man, believe in 
man's regeneration, believe in the kingdom of God 
which can yet come on earth ; and in order to sustain 
that belief, to vitalise it and uphold it in dark days, 
believe in Jesus Christ, through whom alone it can 
come to pass. Amen. 

Henry Scott Holland. 



VI. 

Zhc Divinity of Cbrfst 

THERE are few more famous lines in modern 
English literature than those in which Robert 
Browning, at the close of one of his poems,* brings out 
the significance of the Incarnation. The poem itself 
is a letter written by one Syrian leech to another, 
describing, amongst other things, a meeting between 
himself and Lazarus, whom Christ, some years 
before, had raised from the dead. The writer pro- 
fesses to treat Lazarus as a man under some mania ; 
but he is, none the less, most profoundly impressed. 
The doctrine of " the Word made flesh " seems to 
him, at first, preposterous, something it is infamy 
even to repeat ; and yet it clings to him, and makes, 
in spite of him, a home in his thoughts ; and as his 
letter draws to a close he returns to it, and in a few 
master-strokes draws out a portion, at any rate, of its 
great, its unspeakable significance : — 

The very God ! Think, Abib ; dost thou think ? 
So, the All-Great were the All- Loving too — 
So, through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, " O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 



* " Epistle of Karshish," in Men and Women. 
105 



106 The Faith of Centuries. 

Face, My hands fashioned, see it in Myself ! 
Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of Mine ; 
But love I gave thee, with Myself to love, 
And thou must love Me who have died for thee ! " 
The madman saith He said so : it is strange. 

Such lines reveal to us, I say, something of the 
meaning and wonder which attach to the doctrine of 
the Incarnation — that doctrine which lies at the basis 
of our Christian faith, without which Christianity 
falls in ruins to the ground, and must be counted as 
the most pitiable of all human delusions, the most 
tragic and heart-breaking of all human mistakes. 
But the lines also show us how it is not only to a 
theologian's mind that the Incarnation is a subject 
of profound importance. They make us see how the 
conception of God becoming man, and dwelling in 
our midst, and bearing our sorrows, and sharing our 
trials, and dying our death, is no dry philosophical 
idea, barren of all importance, but one which is still 
full of living force, still able to stir the human spirit, 
and to claim the reverence and homage of the human 
mind. The Incarnation is indeed a dogma in the 
sense that it is a doctrinal formula claiming and 
exacting our acceptance and obedience ; but it is not 
a dogma in that evil sense which circumstances have 
thrown around the word — speculation authoritatively 
taught, but without any real value or bearing upon 
human life. On the contrary, it touches human life 
and renews it. It illuminates every cranny and 
corner of the world, It penetrates everywhere. It 
transfigures everything. Take it away, and shadow 



The Divinity of Christ. 107 

and gloom fall where before there was the glory of 
light. So it is with all true and worthy dogmas. 
You can separate the bad and the good by the very 
simple rule that the good are the illumination and 
warmth and nourishment of the world, while the bad 
are without practical meaning or force or influence. 
There are some dogmas which we all feel to belong 
to this latter class — to be the figments of subtle brains, 
and not limbs of the living truth. They have, at 
times, surrounded the very doctrine of the Incarnation 
with which we have to deal. On the other hand, there 
are dogmas which every one would place in the higher 
category. Such dogmas as "There is a God," or 
" God is love," or " The soul is immortal " we all feel 
to lend existence a richness and worth which would 
be otherwise wanting. They are, by common consent, 
full of life, full of power. Belief in them trans- 
forms all our circumstances. I need not say into 
which class the doctrine of the Incarnation falls in 
the mind of the Christian. There are, too, minds 
which reject it, and which would yet assign it to the 
same category. On the other hand, there are those 
who not only repudiate it, but to whom it is a ques- 
tion non-vital, a side issue, a controversy off the 
beaten track of existence, a speculation without any 
real or practical bearing upon actual life. Here is 
one man, and he tells you that he believes it, and that 
it is to him an all-important truth, a pillar essential to 
the whole edifice of his faith. Here is another, who 
tells you that he does not believe it, but that he 
appreciates the character of the decision which he 



108 The Faith of Centuries 

has made. He is aware that, did he accept the 
doctrine, it would " make all things new " to him. 
But here is a third, who says, " Not only do I not 
believe it, but I do not feel the need of it. I lose 
nothing by my disbelief. My life is not in any way 
impoverished." How are we to answer him ? What 
reply shall we make to him when he assures us that 
there is nothing within him which responds to the 
gospel of the Incarnation ? Before what judge are 
we to take him ? Where shall we find a court of 
appeal from his own heart ? It is just here that such 
lines as those which I have quoted of Browning's enter 
in and help us. For if the doctrine comes home to 
the best and highest and most refined minds, to the 
spiritual imagination of the greatest hearts, may it 
not be the case that when it finds no acceptance the 
fault lies at the door, not of the doctrine, but of those 
who repudiate it ? You cannot expect a cold, 
worldly, hard nature to realise the delicacy, the 
beauty, the persuasiveness, the refinement, of Christian 
truth. You cannot look to the cruel, the cynical, the 
brutal, the lustful, the self-seeking, for a response to 
the Christian message. The blame is not with the 
message, but with those who reject it. So, in the 
same way, the dogma of the Incarnation knocks for 
entrance into some soul. Is it necessarily, because 
the dogma is valueless, that the soul does not open ? 
May it not be that the soul is itself unable to 
appreciate its opportunity, to know the time of its 
visitation ? And when we hear men say, " Such and 
such teaching is mere dogma," it, as often as not, 



The Divinity of Christ. 109 

means that their own spiritual faculties are immature 
and undeveloped, that it is their own religious 
crudity which is responsible for their verdict. In 
approaching the Incarnation we are approaching what 
seems to some among the dry bones of dogmatism ; 
but, on the other side, there are these great master- 
spirits, these great leaders and teachers of thought, 
these trainers of faith and hope and imagination, to 
whom the doctrine has been as a stream of indescrib- 
able light poured from the throne of heaven upon all 
the perplexities and ignorances and tragedies of our 
mortal existence ; and therefore we can, I think, see 
that if the question of the Incarnation is not a living 
and vital question to us, we have every reason to 
suppose that it ought to be so. And I set out with the 
great lines of a great poet because it seems to me 
that every example of poet or philosopher, who bears 
witness to the fulness or importance of any Scriptural 
doctrine, is valuable not only because all personal 
testimony is valuable, but because it helps to raise us 
up from the negation of stupidity or indifference or 
sordidness or guilt to the reverence of those who 
think most profoundly and feel most deeply. " Yes," 
these men say to us, " inquire and probe to the 
bottom. Disbelieve, if you think the proof against 
the doctrine. Be true to your own judgment. Do 
not blind or deceive yourselves. Only be sure that 
you understand what it is that you are handling. 
Approach these questions with awe and humility and 
wonder. If you determine to deny, recognise how 
much is involved in your denial." 



no The Faith of Centuries. 

Let us pass on to the doctrine of the Incarnation 
itself. It is a doctrine which has, at various times, 
been overloaded with metaphysical subtleties, over- 
clouded with the speculative guesses of restlessness ; but 
in its simple Scriptural outlines it is plain enough. God 
has been made man. The Divine Son, one in His 
Deity with the Father, has not only worn our nature 
as some veil or dress, but has deigned to altogether 
participate in it. " Have," says St. Paul, " this mind in 
you, which was also in Christ Jesus : who, being in 
the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an 
equality with God, but emptied Himself, taking the 
form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men ; 
and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled 
Himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the 
death of the cross." * " The Word became flesh," 
says St. John, " and dwelt among us (and we beheld 
His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the 
Father), full of grace and truth." f We can indeed 
understand how, in after-days, when that great truth 
was accepted as beyond dispute, as an axiom holding 
in the sphere of religion the same sort of place as 
evolution and the law of gravity now hold in science, 
philosophy would inquire into it, and seek to explain 
it, and desire to analyse and to split it up, and try 
to show how it all came about. It was the effort to 
explain the doctrine, to show what were its various 
component parts, and what were their relations to each 
other, which led to the discussions and contests as to 
the two natures, as to the interchange of their attribute? 
* Phil. ii. 5, R.V. f Johni. 14, R.V. 



The Divinity of Christ. 1 1 1 

as to the unity of the will of Christ. We may think, 
in these practical days, that such controversies were 
useless and unedifying ; but they were not unnatural. 
There were certain questions which, when men 
began speculating, were bound to arise. To some 
extent they had best have been put aside as beyond 
solution. To some extent it was necessary for the 
Church to deal with them. For when answers began 
to be framed, it was impossible for the Christian 
community to say " Aye " to, or to tolerate with 
tacit acquiescence or indifference, any guess which 
denied on the one side the true Deity or on the 
other the true manhood of Jesus Christ. If either of 
these were sacrificed, then the union of man with 
God went also, and redemption was still an unfulfilled 
hope. Perfect Deity and perfect humanity — these 
were the two constituent elements in the Incarnate 
Saviour, to which the Church was bound, at all 
costs, to be continuously and unflinchingly true. 
There were times when silence would have been dis- 
loyalty, when toleration would have been tantamount 
to treason. 

I have this evening, in what remains of this 
lecture, to speak to you of Christ's Deity — or, to 
use the looser and vaguer word which is sometimes 
adopted, His Divinity — to say why I believe in 
it, and why I dare to commend it to the belief of 
others. Now the difficulty in arguing such a matter 
as this is that one never knows how much one 
may take for granted. If you discuss the matter 
with an old-fashioned Unitarian — such as would be 



ii2 The Faith of Centuries. 

represented by Channing — then you have the whole of 
the New Testament allowed you as a court of appeal. 
The question becomes one of the exact meaning and 
force of texts. If, however, you take the newer school 
of Unitarianism — the school of which such a writer 
as Martineau would be the spokesman — then you 
have a more treacherous footing. For you find the 
historic trustworthiness of the Gospels largely and 
fearlessly impugned. You are told that Christ never 
said much of what He is represented as saying, that 
in later times His disciples coined His claims and 
passed them off as His own* And the influence of 
this new school has made itself felt, even among those 
who know nothing of critical questions, and who are 
completely ignorant of the literary or historic argu- 
ments for and against the truth of the Gospels. They 
feel only that there is unrest in the air. They are 
aware that many deny, and they are oppressed with a 
sense of not knowing exactly how much of the ground 
is insecure and how much of it is firm. I want, there- 
fore, not to argue from isolated verses in the Gospels 
such as, " I and My Father are one, ,; or " Before 
Abraham was I am," or " He that hath seen Me hath 
seen the Father," but from the whole drift and flow of 
the Evangelists* records. To what conclusion does 
their general testimony point? What is the plain 
suggestion of the picture as a whole, apart from 
any particular detail in it? May we not say that 
if anything of the Scriptural portrait is to be allowed 

• This change of ground is alluded to in the preface to (I think) the 
last edition of Canon Liddon's Bampton Lectures. 



The Divinity of Christ. 113 

to remain at all, that unless the process of excision 
is to be carried so far as to amount practically to 
the excision of the whole, four things will continue 
to stand out large and clear? It is difficult to doubt 
that, even if there be a host of minor errors in the 
Gospels, there are four characteristics attaching to 
their representation of the Christ which are true 
to life, which reflect with accuracy and fidelity the 
original. Let us look at each of these in turn. 

In the first place, Christ's system centres in 
Himself. Let us pause to reflect on the true and 
full significance of this. What is the aim, the object, 
of every religious teacher worthy of the name? Is it 
not to bind men close to the God who made them, 
and to obliterate himself ? " We preach not ourselves," 
says St. Paul, and he has spoken for all the true 
teachers and genuine reformers of every age. Each 
servant, each minister, each evangelist, each prophet 
of the Most High, preaches Him whom he serves, and 
not his own wisdom or name or power or greatness. 
He seeks nothing for himself, he claims nothing for 
himself ; he is content to be a mere voice, to be the 
agent through whom the Divine commands are made 
known, the Divine will expressed. When Luther 
struck the fetters of Rome from the souls of men, 
was it that he proclaimed himself? When Wesley 
or Whitfield held large crowds spellbound, when 
they gathered the common people in thousands to 
the fields and hillsides to hear them, when their 
great words awoke a slumbering nation, was it that 
they made themselves the burden of their message, 

8 



ii4 The Faith of Centuries. 

that they held themselves up as the standard round 
which men and women, in all their moral and 
spiritual necessities, were to rally ? What should we 
have said of them had they done so? Their names 
would long ago have been drowned in a sea of 
derision or contempt. But turn to Jesus Christ. 
What do we find to have been the substance of His 
message ? It is Himself. To whom did He bid men 
come ? To Himself. Take that invitation which is 
perhaps for some of us the most familiar and the 
most touching of all His sayings. " Come unto Me, 
all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give 
you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me ; 
for I am meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find 
rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My 
burden is light." Have we ever reflected upon the 
vastness of the claim which is implied in these 
well-known words ? Who is this that thus invites 
men to himself? Who is this that ventures to say, 
" I, even I, will give you rest " ? Who is this that 
offers himself as the haven for the storm-tossed soul ? 
How does any man dare to so exalt himself? How 
does any man dare to use language of such a kind ? 
But Jesus Christ's language is all through of a similar 
nature. It is not here only that His words have this 
colour. It is not here only that He adopts this tone. 
It is His regular tone. The allegiance which He 
claims is throughout for Himself. The discipleship 
which He asks has Himself as its object. It is to 
Himself that loyalty and obedience and service are to 

- * Matt. xi. 28-30. 



The Divinity of Christ. 115 

be offered. He insists upon self-surrender to Himself. 
There must be no sacrifice which a follower is un- 
willing to make. He places Himself beyond all, even 
the most sacred of, home ties. No duty to father 
or mother or husband or wife or child compares with 
the duty which the disciple owes to Him. " He that 
loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy 
of Me : and he that loveth son or daughter more 
than Me is not worthy of Me." * " And He said unto 
another, Follow Me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first 
to go and bury my father. But He said unto him, 
Leave the dead to bury their own dead ; but go 
thou and publish abroad the kingdom of God. And 
another also said, I will follow Thee, Lord ; but first 
suffer me to bid farewell to them that are at my house. 
But Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his 
hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the 
kingdom of God." f Nay, further, He so far asserts 
Himself as to claim authority to over-ride the Mosaic 
Law. Remember it is the claim of a Jew. Remember 
what the Mosaic Law was in the eyes of a Jew. But 
here is One, " born of the seed of David," bred and nur- 
tured and educated amidst Jewish traditions, accepting, 
and at times emphasising, His calling as a member of 
Israel's household, who assumes Divine authority even 
over the sacred Law of centuries. What had been 
good and sufficient before — the Law as it was pro- 
nounced by " them of old time " — is inadequate now 
that He is come. He is the final Revealer of the 
Divine will. It is not that, like some new Rabbi, he 

* Matt. x. 37. t Luke ix. 59-62, R.V. 



n6 The Faith of Centuries. 

offers a better interpretation, a truer rendering, of the 
old Law. It is that He puts forward a New Law — a 
Law having its roots in Himself. And this New Law 
is to be paramount. His commandments are to take 
precedence. When His teaching and Judaism clash, 
Judaism is to yield. Moses and the Prophets fall 
away. He steps into their place. Or look at His 
training of His disciples. What is it in which 
He rears them? What is it that He seeks to 
cultivate in them ? Is it not faith in Himself? 
He bids them place their whole reliance on Him, 
to give Him their whole heart, to live and die for 
Him, to give up all for Him. It is He who is 
to be the object of all their affections, the centre 
of their hopes, the recipient of their religious and 
spiritual enthusiasm. The attachment of followers to 
a chief is lawful only to a point. When attachment 
goes beyond that point it becomes idolatry. But 
Christ sought from His disciples an attachment 
which knew no limits, which was restrained by no 
boundaries. The fear of idolatry is not one which 
ever enters the disciples' minds ; it is not a danger 
which their Master ever suggests to them. There is 
no check placed upon their love for Himself, upon 
their devotion to Himself. Their love and devotion 
cannot go too far, cannot trespass upon the duty that 
they owe to One in heaven. " Christ," says a modern 
writer, " was systematically training them to trust Him 
with the sort of trust which can be legitimately given 
to God alone/' * It is more than difficult to read even 

* Gore, Bampton Lectures, p. 13. 



The Divinity of Christ. 1 1 7 

the Synoptic Gospels — to say nothing of the Fourth 
— and to deny it. But if there is this characteristic 
adhering to Christ's work, if we find it showing itself 
beyond question, in one form or another, in all 
His ministry and teaching, then we have before us 
what is of indisputable weight and significance. It is 
not a characteristic which can be pushed aside and 
ignored and left outside the range of our considera- 
tion. It must receive its due measure of recognition. 
It must be taken into adequate account. 

Then, secondly, call to mind His claim to sinless- 
ness. For that claim, definitely made on one occasion,* 
is implied throughout His life. Christ put before 
men the ideal of absolute perfection. "Ye there- 
fore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is 
perfect." Is it not an impressive fact that He 
never suggests that He Himself falls short of the 
standard ? Search His personal history through. 
Search His teaching and discourses through, and 
nowhere do you detect one word of repentance, 
one syllable of self-reproach. He prays indeed, but 
His prayers are prayers for strength, and not con- 
fessions of sin. He bids us seek forgiveness for 
our trespasses : nowhere does He seek it Himself. 
Nowhere is there a hint of any sense of moral failure 
or moral weakness. Nowhere does He suggest that 
He falls below perfect holiness. The one exception 
that at first suggests itself, proves, on further investi- 
gation, to be no exception at all. We are told that a 
young ruler came and fell down at His feet and asked 

* John viii, 46. 



n8 The Faith of Centuries. 

Him, " Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit 
eternal life ? " " Why callest thou Me good ? " was 
the reply. " None is good save One, even God." * 
Does not Jesus, I may be asked, here repudiate the 
title " good " as one which cannot be justly used of 
any man, and cannot therefore be applied to Himself? 
But the words are capable of another interpretation. 
Christ may well have meant, " Think what the words 
suggest which you so lightly use. Why call Me good 
unless you are prepared to go beyond My humanity ? 
Who among the sons of men dares claim or receive 
the praise of goodness ? If indeed you so address 
Me, if you mean what you say, if you find in Me no 
flaw or fault or guilt, then consider to what such 
unstained innocence points. If I be good, a higher 
title than that of ' Master ' is My due." Such an 
interpretation is at least as possible as the other ; and 
if, of the two, this one fits in with all the rest of the 
Scriptural picture, while the other is out of keeping 
with it and jars upon it, surely that which harmonises 
with it is the one to be preferred. And the picture 
which the Evangelists paint for us is, as I have said, 
the picture of a character without any consciousness 
of sin. It is not the usual characteristic of the saint. 
You find, low down in the moral scale, the lack of any 
sufficient sense of moral guilt and moral short-coming. 
But you do not find it as you go higher. The better 
a man is, the acuter is his realisation of his faults. It 
is not by the hardened criminal, but by the delicate- 
minded, sensitive saint, that the shame and horror and 
* Markx. 17, 18, R.V. 



The Divinity of Christ. 119 

misery of wrong-doing are so keenly, so acutely, so 
bitterly felt. The one is proof against a sense of sin ; 
the other is burnt by it, as the tender skin is burnt by 
fire. You do not expect to hear the language of self- 
acquittal from those who are nearest the angelic level, 
from those who are purest and most truthful and most 
self-denying and most humble and most spiritual. 
Nay, it is in these that you find the deepest self- 
humiliation. Their appreciation of goodness, their 
interpretation of human duties, the loftiness of their 
ideals, the fact that their eyes are opened to the real 
meaning of holiness, lead them to feel their own 
unworthiness, to understand and recognise how great 
is their failure, how wide is the gulf between them- 
selves and the Divine likeness. Listen to their 
prayers, and you find how full they are of confession, 
of contrition, of repentance. They know themselves 
to be, at the best, but " unprofitable servants." The 
cry of their inmost souls is for grace and pardon 
and healing. They class themselves with the guilty 
publican, and not with the self-righteous Pharisee : 
" Lord, be merciful to me a sinner." And yet here, 
when you climb from the saint to Christ, you discern 
at once a startling change. One of the best of the 
saintly characteristics is gone, and its place is taken 
by its very opposite. Here you have one who not 
only dares to claim, in implicit words at one memor- 
able moment, to know personally nothing of moral 
stain and defilement, but who claims it not less by 
His whole bearing, by His whole religious attitude. 
Look at Him even in the supreme crisis of His life. 



1 20 • The Faith of Centuries. 

Look at Him as He and death are brought face to 
face. Call up before you the death-beds of the 
noblest, the holiest, the most devout men and women 
you have ever known, of those of whom you feel that 
their lives were indeed lived " in heavenly places." 
They have met their end bravely, resolutely, fearlessly, 
perhaps heroically. There have been pious resigna- 
tion, and calm trust, and firm faith, and unclouded 
hope. But has there not also been " a broken and 
a contrite heart " ? Where has their confidence 
sprung ? From their belief in the mercy and loving- 
kindness of God, in the infinitude of His compassion 
and goodwill. What was the word that most often 
rose to their lips as they looked back over their lives ? 
Was it not the word " forgiveness " ? But pass in 
thought to that awful scene at Calvary, to the centre 
one of the three crosses raised there, to the Sufferer 
who hangs on it. He has prayed for those that 
placed Him there, prayed that the sin of His de- 
struction be not counted against them. " Father, 
forgive them ; for they know not what they do." * 
But does He pray for forgiveness for Himself? The 
Evangelists record, in all, seven of His sayings 
during these last hours ; but not one of these sayings 
is even a pale reflection of such a prayer. It may of 

* Luke xxiii. 34. The Revised Version has a marginal note that 
"some ancient authorities omit" these words. Westcott and Hort, in 
their edition of the text of the New Testament, go further. "We 
cannot doubt," they say, " that [the verse] comes from an extraneous 
source." But the question of its genuineness has no bearing whatever 
upon the argument of this portion of my address. It is not as if the 
verse were a prayer for His own forgiveness. 



The Divinity of Christ. . 121 

course be said that we cannot be sure that we have 
all the sayings. Very possibly we have not. But 
there is no escape from this : that the accounts of 
His death, so far as they go, tally completely and 
exactly with those of His life. Throughout His 
ministry He claims to be sinless. He claims to be 
sinless in this fearful climax of it. Not even now, 
in these the most solemn and searching moments of 
mortal existence, is there any confession of moral 
unworthiness and insufficiency. 

The argument, you will observe, is not from what 
His Apostles or biographers or disciples believed Him 
to be, but from what He ventured to assert of 
Himself. Had I made it a question of the faith of 
others, there might have been counter-suggestions 
of over-enthusiasm, of the proverbial blindness of 
love, of lack of discernment and judgment, of want 
of perception and discrimination. But the stress falls 
upon His own judgment as to His life, upon His own 
verdict as to His character — so far as that judgment 
and verdict can be seen from the narratives of His 
ministry. And surely they can be very plainly seen. 
Only once indeed does He put them into words ; 
but they are not the less discernible, not the less 
clear, from first to last. And from first to last that 
verdict and that judgment are the same. From first 
to last we are met by the same unfaltering challenge : 
" ' Which of you convinceth Me of sin ' — which of you 
on earth or in heaven ? " 

Here, then, is a second feature in the Gospel portrait, 
one of profound importance, one which we must Iook 



122 The Faith of Centuries. 

full in the face in framing our answer to the famous 
question, " What think ye of Christ ? " 

Let us pass to another characteristic— the third of 
the four. Christ declared Himself to be the future 
judge of the world. He does so, not once or twice, 
but repeatedly. It is a claim that runs all through 
the Gospels. We meet with it as early as the Sermon 
on the Mount : " Many will say to Me in that 
day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by Thy name, 
and by Thy name cast out devils, and by Thy name 
do many mighty works? And then will I profess 
unto them, I never knew you : depart from Me, ye 
that work iniquity." * We meet with it in the 
Parable of the Tares : " As therefore the tares are 
gathered up and burned with fire ; so shall it be in 
the end of the world. The Son of Man shall send 
forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His 
kingdom all things that cause stumbling, and them 
that do iniquity, and shall cast them into the fur- 
nace of fire." f We meet with it immediately after 
St. Peter's confession of Him at Csesarea Philippi : 
" The Son of Man shall come in the glory of His 
Father with His angels ; and then shall He render 
unto every man according to his deeds." J We 
meet with it in that mysterious discourse "as He 
sat on the Mount of Olives " : " As the lightning 
cometh forth from the east, and is seen even unto 
the west ; so shall be the coming of the Son of 
Man. . . . And He shall send forth His angels with 

* Matt. vii. 22, 23, R.V. f Matt. xiii. 40-42, R.V. 

t Matt. xvi. 27, R.V. 



The Divinity of Christ. 123 

a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather 
together His elect from the four winds, from one end 
of heaven to the other." * He it is who as master 
of the house returns in an unexpected hour and 
takes vengeance on " the evil servant." f He it is 
who as the bridegroom closes the door on the 
unready virgins.J He it is who as a master of 
servants rewards the one who had earned five talents 
and punishes the one who had been " wicked and 
slothful " : " Well done, good and faithful servant : 
thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will set 
thee over many things : enter thou into the joy of 
thy Lord. . . . Cast ye out the unprofitable servant 
into the outer darkness : there shall be the weeping 
and gnashing of teeth." § And one of the last of 
His discourses, delivered, so to speak, with the Cross 
full in view, is that in which He brings before us, 
as in a parable, the day of judgment, " when the 
Son of Man shall come in His glory . . . and before 
Him shall be gathered all the nations : and He 
shall separate them one from another, as the 
shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats." || 
It is, I say, a claim made repeatedly.1T But pause 
to reflect what such a claim means. It is one 

* Matt. xxiv. 27, 31, R. V. f Matt. xxiv. 42-51. 

t Matt. xxv. iff. § Matt. xxv. 23, 30, R.V. 

|| Matt. xxv. 31, 32, R.V. 

IT The claim is also made in the clearest possible manner in John 
v. 22, 27 ; but I keep the argument, as far as possible, clear of the 
Fourth Gospel, owing to the serious difficulties which are felt by some 
— in my opinion without adequate justification — with regard to its 
authorship and historical trustworthiness. 



124 The Faith of Centuries. 

which thought or imagination finds hard to measure. 
In front of Him are, He says, to be gathered all 
peoples. They will come from every clime, every 
continent, every age, every generation, every class. 
The earth will deliver up its prisoners. The sea will 
surrender its dead. " Before Him shall be gathered 
all the nations." Try to contemplate the millions 
upon millions who are, according to the Scriptural 
description, to be summoned to that supreme bar, and 
to be judged, not in the aggregate, but individually, 
one by one. Each will have had his separate tempta- 
tions, his separate struggles, his separate failures, his 
separate victories. The measure of praise or blame 
will, in each case, be different. One will have had 
exceptional chances and opportunities. Another will 
have been kept back by exceptional difficulties and 
hindrances. For one there will be unforeseen allow- 
ances to be made. In the case of another there will 
be circumstances and surroundings which, so far from 
mitigating his guilt, only deepen and aggravate it. 
Think how intricate is even the simplest human char- 
acter. Think how hard it is to undo the tangled skein 
of it, to unravel the threads which are so closely 
intertwined. Bear in mind how difficult, how im- 
possible at times, it is to judge even one whom we 
know thoroughly well, whom we have every opportunity 
of watching, with whom we are brought into the most 
intimate, the most familiar, contact. How much, 
for example, depends on motives ! You overlook 
much if the motive was good. You discount the 
worth of a deed, or ignore it altogether, if the motive 



The Divinity of Christ. 125 

was bad. Indeed, there are some philosophers who 
say that the motive is everything, that the value of 
an action depends solely and exclusively upon the 
intention that prompted it, and not upon the external 
character of the action itself. Whether this is so or 
not, motive unquestionably is a very important 
factor in any question as to a person's culpability ; 
and motives cannot sometimes be read or even 
guessed at. They lie hidden. They are covered up 
so as to be beyond scrutiny. Often enough the 
motive is mixed. There is an element of good in it ; 
there is also in it an element which is unworthy, 
perhaps positively base. In such cases it becomes 
more than ever impossible for us to weigh and define 
the exact merit of an action, or to compare it with the 
exact merit of some other. This is so even with the 
actions of those whom we know best. But Christ 
shrinks not from asserting His capacity and authority 
to judge all men ; He shrinks not from asserting that 
He has alike the personal moral perfection and the 
intimate knowledge of souls and the spiritual insight 
into the secret recesses of the human heart requisite 
for so awful an office. He declares that the vast, in- 
calculable multitude of the world's inhabitants will be 
brought before Him, and that " He will judge each with 
a judgment" that shall be perfect and final. There is 
to be no appeal, no possibility of reversal : " He will 
reserve no cases as involving moral complex problems 
beyond His own power of decision." * As He decides, 
so will the man's fate be. As He determines, so will 

* Liddon, Bampton Lectures, p. 176. 



126 The Faith of Centuries. 

the destiny of each be. Can words exaggerate the 
tremendous character of the claim? Can we over- 
state all that is gathered up in it ? Nay, can any 
words adequately describe it ? Does not the human 
mind stand appalled before it ? Even a Solomon — 
a Solomon in wisdom, but without his vices — would 
shrink from deciding the eternal lot of even the 
basest, most brutal criminal. He would feel that 
there might be circumstances which, were he aware of 
them, would modify his judgment, would abate the 
rigour of his sentence. Perhaps the offender inherited 
passions which, in the end, overcame him. Perhaps 
his youth was lived amidst haunts of vice which 
deprived him of all real chance of learning the lessons 
of goodness and truth and rectitude. Perhaps his fall 
came only after very real fights with fierce temptation. 
Perhaps there were hours of sorrow and remorse, of 
true desires for something better and purer, of sincere 
wishes to be free from the chains of debauchery and 
lust, from the dominion of sin and crime. Perhaps 
he had really endeavoured to recover lost ground, 
and it was only when he experienced, like Jean 
Valjean in Les Miserables, the vendetta of the law, 
that he gave himself altogether over to evil courses. 
Perhaps he never had extended to him the helping 
hand, which might have made just all the difference. 
Take some saint amongst us — some Christ-like man or 
woman — and place opposite some ruffian or scoundrel, 
some habitui of our gaols, some murderer doomed to 
the scaffold, and say to the saint, " Judge this sinner. 
Determine the fate of his soul. Decide whether he 



The Divinity of Christ. 127 

is to be saved or damned." Do you think that the 
holiest amongst us would presume to make so terrible 
a decision ? And yet Christ claims to be the judge 
of all the characters in the long history of the world. 
He will estimate them, in all their complexity, even 
where good and evil are most confused. Each man, 
each woman, each child, will come before Him. Each 
soul will stand in His presence, with its confused 
record of good and evil, of conflict and cowardice, of 
attainment and short-coming, of real struggles and 
half-efforts, of honourable ambitions and contemptible 
aims. Nay, it will be a question not only of outward 
actions, and of the motives underlying those actions, 
but also of hidden capacities. 

Not on the vulgar mass 

Called " work " must sentence pass ; 

but also on 

All instincts immature, 

All purposes unsure, 

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the 

Man's amount.* 

But Christ says — not once, but again and again — 
that He will estimate that amount ; that He will 
declare it sufficient or insufficient ; that He will set 
the good off against the bad, the worthy against the 
unworthy ; that He will compare and adjust, and will 
strike the balance with no faltering hand. He will 
part men, one from another, with an unfailing judg- 
ment. " He shall separate them one from another as 
a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats." This 

* Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra, 



128 The Faith of Centuries. 

third feature in Christ's ministry is perhaps the most 
striking, the most suggestive, the most momentous 
of all. 

The fourth may be treated more briefly. It is that 
Christ in His ordinary language puts Himself into a 
special relation to God on the one side, to man on 
the other. It is not only in the Fourth Gospel that 
Jesus claims to be the Divine Son in a special and 
peculiar meaning of the words. In the Synoptists 
also we find Him separating the Divine Fatherhood, 
as it stands towards Himself, from that Fatherhood 
in its connection with mankind at large. " All things 
have been delivered unto Me of My Father : and no 
one knoweth the Son, save the Father ; neither doth 
any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whom- 
soever the Son willeth to reveal Him." * But I desire 
to press, as I have said, not individual texts so much 
as the general portraiture. There is, however, one 
feature in the general portraiture which will strike a 
careful reader of the New Testament at once. Nowhere, 
in any Gospel, does Christ so associate Himself with the 
disciples as to speak to them of our heavenly Father? 
" After this manner therefore pray ye> Our Father." 
But He Himself calls Him " My Father." " I say unto 
you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the 
face of My Father which is in heaven." t "If two 
of you shall agree on earth as touching anything 
that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of 
My Father which is in heaven." % " To sit on My 
right hand, and on My left hand, is not Mine to 

* Matt. xi. 27, R.V. f Matt, xviii. 10 % Matt, xviii. 19. 



The Divinity of Christ. 129 

give, but it is for them for whom it hath been pre- 
pared of My Father." * He draws a line of division, 
between Himself and His followers, at that very point 
where we should have looked for a close bond of 
union and fellowship. To us, to mankind at large, 
the thought of God is always one which recalls us 
to the recollection of our unity. In God we are 
all "one man." Whatever social distinctions may 
separate us, whatever the difference in our intellectual 
attainments, be we rich or poor, in honour or dis- 
honour, in happiness or misery, we are all children 
of God. There at any rate we are on the same 
platform. There at any rate we share and share 
alike. But Jesus Christ will not accept this unity. 
He will not come into the presence of God hand in 
hand with His disciples. God, He meant them to 
feel, was His God in a different sense to that in 
which He was theirs. Can religious exclusiveness be 
pushed further? Even in the extremest Pharisaism 
there was nothing to compare with it. The Pharisees 
were, as their name implies, " the separated ones," 
but they never asserted a separation so wide as this 
which Jesus declares to exist between Himself and 
even the innermost circle of His followers. Or if we 
turn to His self-description in relation to humanity, 
we find there also what suggests a similar claim to 
isolation. He is according to His own expression 
" the Son of Man." It is His own title for Him- 
self. Again and again He so speaks of Himself. An 

* Matt. xx. 23, R*V. In St. John Christ frequently uses the phrase 
"The Father," but never " Our Father." 

9 



130 The Faith of Centuries. 

illustration might be found on almost every page of 
the first three Gospels. The title is rather less frequent 
in St. John, but it is found there also.* What does 
such a phrase convey ? What was it intended to 
imply ? It has been thought that the expression 
was Messianic, that Jesus in using it meant to claim 
the Messianic calling and dignity, that He intended 
His hearers to realise that He was the long-hoped- 
for, the long-delayed fulfilment of Israel's deepest 
and innermost hopes. But there are considerable 
difficulties in the way of such a supposition. There 
is no clear instance either in the Old Testament or 
in the Apocrypha of the exact phrase ever being 
applied to the Messiah, and " it is," if not " inconceiv- 
able," at any rate difficult to understand and account 
for, " that the Lord should have adopted a title which 
was popularly held to be synonymous with that of 
Messiah, while He carefully avoided the title of 
Messiah itself" f But if the title was not Messianic, 
what was its exact significance ? It is sufficient 
for our purposes this evening to understand by it 
an assertion of Himself as the representative of 
humanity. He was, he meant, something beyond a 
common member of the human race. He gathered 
into Himself and completed and perfected all that 
in human existence is scattered and incomplete and 
imperfect. Here again, then, He will not join Him- 

* The numbers are : in St. Matthew, 30 times ; in St. Mark, 1 3 ; in 
St. Luke, 25 ; in St. John, 12. — From Westcott's St. John. 

f Westcott, Gospel according to St. John, p. 34, where the whole 
question is thoroughly gone into. On the other hand, Canon Liddon, 
in his Bampton Lectures, treats the expression as Messianic. 



The Divinity of Christ. 131 

self with His disciples ; He will not stand foot to 
foot with them. He does indeed accept a common 
basis of life with them, for He accepts their humanity ; 
but they are to Him but the fragmentary manifesta- 
tions of life, while He is the manifestation of it in 
its unbroken totality. As He has special and unique 
kinship with " the Father," so in His own eyes has 
He special and unique kinship with humanity. In 
both aspects He claimed to be alone. Is such a 
claim to be put aside as without meaning or im- 
portance ? Is it not one which must be taken into 
the reckoning, which must receive its due weight, its 
full measure of remark ? 

Here, then, we have four leading characteristics of 
Jesus Christ's life and ministry — characteristics de- 
pending on no isolated texts, separate from all 
questions as to the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, 
but none the less standing out in bold relief, challeng- 
ing our verdict. And what is our verdict ? Brethren, 
it must be one of two. You must either accept 
Christ as Divine, you must confess Him to be God 
Incarnate, or you must give up His moral character. 
It is not only that "without the mysterious Divine 
groundwork of the nature of Christ His moral qualities 
would be powerless " * ; it is that without that ground- 
work His leading qualities would cease to be moral 
at all. Men, as they rise in the moral scale, do not 
come any nearer to making, or being able to make, 
such claims as those to which Jesus Christ gave 
continuous and deliberate expression. Even one 

* Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, p. 271. 



132 The Faith of Centuries 

who stood on the apex of human goodness would 
shrink from them not less, and perhaps more, than 
one who walked on the broad plain of moral common- 
place. A mere man — even though he be a prophet 
or " more than a prophet " — cannot place himself in 
any such relation to any religious system as Christ 
did to Christianity, much less can he assert for 
himself a unique relation to the Almighty Father, 
without laying himself open to torrents of well- 
merited blame and indignation. A mere man cannot 
without the grossest immorality deck himself in the 
robes of the Eternal Judge. Such an act is more 
than presumption ; it is rank blasphemy. It points 
to something beyond fanaticism : it points to spiritual 
and moral delirium. A mere man cannot claim 
sinlessness, or allow others to attribute sinlessness to 
him, except at the forfeit of all right to " respect." 
Such a man would be a vain and empty-headed 
charlatan, a pretentious and shameless deceiver. It 
is now thirty years since the late Canon Liddon 
familiarised English thought with the axiom, 
" Christus si non Deus non bonus " (" Christ, if He be 
not God, ceases to be good "). Christ's self-assertion 
either exalts Him to the Divine throne, or plunges 
Him into a depth of condemnation such as we need 
not stop to measure with exactness. It is an awful 
alternative ; but throughout all the cloud of controversy 
which has gathered about Him we see, directly we 
look steadily and resolutely, that it is the alternative — 
and it is an alternative which modern discussion over 
the Gospels has really left untouched. Behind all these 



The Divinity of Christ. 133 

discussions, these four characteristics of which I have 
spoken continue to be conspicuous ; you cannot get 
rid of them unless you get rid of the Gospels practi- 
cally altogether, unless you are prepared to relegate 
the story of Christ to the same storehouse of myths as 
the legends about Odin or King Arthur. It is, indeed, 
an alternative from which men shrink, because they 
hesitate to sacrifice the moral beauty which they 
instinctively feel to belong to Jesus. But it is an 
alternative which is none the less fairly pressed upon 
them. We shudder when some one, like Mr. F. W. 
Newman,* strips the life of Jesus of its sublimity, and 
depicts it as approaching, at any rate, that of a 
pretender and impostor. It horrifies us to hear the 
charge of vanity or insincerity or ostentation, or. to 
hear Him placed in moral worth and excellence 
below numbers of His unhonoured disciples. But 
is there any logical halting-place between this con- 
demnation and the admission of His Deity? Halting- 
places have doubtless been sought ; and men have 
said to themselves again and again that they have 
found one, and again and again have they been 
thankful to rest in it, like worn-out wayfarers whose 
feet bleed from the stones of controversy. " We 
cannot," they say to us, " accept all that you accept. 
The Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Miracles, the 
Divinity of Christ — these are outside our faith, these 
we are unable to believe in. But even when these 
are gone there still remains what we are able to be 
thankful for, and to find comfort in, and to draw 

* Phases of Faith. 



134 The Faith of Centuries. 

inspiration from. There still remains the character 
of Jesus ; there still remain His personal holiness, 
His ethical ideals, His sublime life and death." Now 
with the Resurrection and the Miracles I am not in 
this address concerned. But looking at this position 
in its relation to the Incarnation and the Divinity of 
Christ, I venture to say that it is not one which 
argument can justify. It is really one of rather 
shallow sentiment. This talk of resting in the moral 
character of a purely human Christ is only the 
clap-trap of unorthodoxy. We seem indeed to have 
offered us a convenient compromise, one which 
appeals perhaps to our laziness, perhaps to our 
genuine exhaustion. But it is an impossible com- 
promise. Accept it, and you lose not only the 
Divinity, but the moral worth as well. You are 
bound to say either that Christ was Divine, Divine in 
the uttermost sense of the word, or that His whole 
life moved on false lines— either that He was 
" very God," or that the moral glory, in which we 
delight to believe, crumbles away into nothingness. 
And if these are the two alternatives, if the argu- 
ment can be sustained which leaves us with them 
and them alone before us, can we doubt as to 
our choice ? Can we really give up what we have 
prized so dearly, even in the hours of doubt and 
bewilderment and uncertainty, in the hours when we 
have not known what to think, what to rely on, what 
to put our faith in— the character of that most 
wondrous, most pathetic figure, which rises so high 
above all others on the crowded stage of history? 



The Divinity of Christ. 135 

Here and there a man has been found to make 
the sacrifice which logic demands. Here and there 
you find one to whom Jesus Christ is not even 
" an ensample of godly life." To most men, how- 
ever, such a conclusion would be as a precipice from 
which they recoil in dismay. But argue from any 
view of Christ's person except that of His true 
and complete Divinity, and sooner or later you are 
dragged, by the remorseless force of the argument, 
to that precipice. Your only escape will be to take 
refuge in vague uncertainties and generalities, in a 
refusal to follow the footsteps of your own principles, 
to accept the conclusions which proceed from your 
own premises. But a position which can only be 
maintained so long as no inconvenient questions are 
pushed home cannot in the end content us. We 
must leave it and go either one way or the other — 
either to such a verdict as Mr. Newman's in Phases of 
Faith, or to the confession of the Church of Christ, 
" Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father." 
. I have no time left to show, in any detail, how this 
verdict has from the first been that of the Catholic 
Church. There were, indeed, early disciples who 
rejected Christ's Divinity — the sect of the Ebionites 
made Christ a mere man — but it is indisputable that 
they were always looked on as heretics, and their 
creed rejected as a violation of all tradition. The 
Church, as a whole, from the first worshipped Christ 
as God, prayed to Him as God, reverenced Him as 
one who in all literal truth had, in the infinity of 
His condescension, come from the supreme throne 



136 The Faith of Centuries. 

to be the Saviour and guide and restorer of mankind 
Again, I do not wish to insist upon special texts so 
much as upon the general tenor of the evidence, 
although special texts from an epistle of undoubted 
or defensible authenticity are conclusive testimony 
as to the mind and meaning and doctrine of the 
writer. But putting aside special texts for a moment, 
we cannot read either Acts or Epistles without seeing 
that there is Divine honour paid to Jesus Christ. 
The highest attributes are ascribed to Him. Grace 
comes from Him as well as from the Father. 
Salvation is through His name alone. He is the 
High Priest perfect and without sin. He is the 
Prince of Life, the Judge of quick and dead. 
He is from first to last the Lord Jesus, the Son 
of God. Are we to take all this as the effusion 
of sentiment, as expressions of devotion which is 
not too careful to draw the line ? Consider that 
they are the words of strict and rigid Jewish mono- 
theists. The Israelite was unspeakably jealous of 
anything that seemed to usurp Divine honour, of 
any trespass upon the solitariness of the Divine 
majesty and greatness. Can we suppose that any 
one brought up as St. Paul had been would have 
tolerated for a single instant the elevation of any 
human teacher to such a position as that which 
Jesus Christ occupies in all the Epistles of the New 
Testament, had he not been persuaded that He 
who was thus honoured and reverenced was one 
with that God who had revealed Himself in Law 
and Prophets? Let us, for the sake of clearness, 



The Divinity of Christ. 137 

gather the argument round two texts, which shall be 
taken from what are, in all probability, not only the 
two earliest Epistles of St. Paul, but also the two 
earliest of all the New Testament writings. We 
shall, therefore, have the incidental advantage of 
being carried by them, as far as possible, to the 
primitive mind of the Church. The first of them is 
1 Thess. iii. 11-13 : "Now may our God and Father 
Himself, and our Lord Jesus, direct our way unto you : 
and the Lord make you to increase and abound in 
love one toward another, and toward all men, even as 
we also do toward you ; to the end He may stablish 
your hearts unblameable in holiness before our God 
and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ 
with all His saints." You will notice that in the 
first clause we have the power to direct and guide 
and order the ways of men ascribed simultaneously 
to the Father and to Christ. In the next, however, 
there is no reference to the Father at all. The giver 
of spiritual gifts is Jesus Christ. He it is who is the 
source and fountain of moral and religious growth. 
" May Christ increase your love, that ye may be 
blameless before the Father." The second of the two 
passages is even more remarkable. It is 2 Thess. ii. 
16, 17: "Now our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and 
God our Father which loved us, and gave us eternal 
comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your 
hearts and stablish them in every good word and 
work." Here there is not only co-ordination between 
Father and Son, as conjointly the eternal spring of 
consolation and hope, as conjointly the irrefragable 



138 The Faith of Centuries. 

strength of human hearts, but the Son is actually 
placed and mentioned first* Now are either of 
these passages possible except upon one supposition 
as to the writer's faith ? Remember they come from 
the pen not only of a Jew, but of one who had been 
born and bred a Pharisee, from one schooled and 
versed in all the traditions and scruples and pro- 
hibitions of the Rabbinical schools. No doubt St. 
Paul, when he became a Christian, gave up many of 
the prejudices of Judaism. But we know exactly what 
he gave up ; we know the precise extent to which 
he sacrificed his previous opinions. He approached 
nearer to true catholicity, but he did not approach 
one single step nearer idolatry. He remained as 
strict, as inflexible, a monotheist as before. How 
then are we to explain these and the many similar 
passages from his Epistles? There is only one 
explanation. Only one supposition reconciles them 
with monotheism. To St. Paul Christ was truly and 
unequivocally Divine. And so in the case of the 
Epistles which are from other pens than St. Paurs. We 
must read them remembering who wrote them, read 
them as coming from men who were both by nature 
and training quick to scent and stamp out blasphemy ; 
and we have then to ask ourselves whether the posi- 
tion which they assign to Christ is reconcilable with 
any other belief than that He came forth from, and 
had returned within, the circle of true Deity ? 
And when we see the evidence and testimony of 

* A parallel instance of precedence being given to the name and 
thought of Christ is to be found in the familiar verse 2 Cor. xiii. 14. 



The Divinity of Christ 139 

the general stream of the Apostolic writings, we 
are prepared to give full weight to those special 
passages in which the Godhead of Christ is ex- 
pressly stated. They will no longer seem to us 
fragments of testimony, weak because they come 
but rarely, but they will be the clear, precise 
utterance of a faith which is all along implied. They 
will be the certain proof that the suggestions of the 
Epistles generally have been accurately read by 
us ; that we were right in supposing them — no less 
than the Gospels — to teach that Jesus was God 
manifested in human flesh. They catch up, as it 
were, into a brief summary what has all through 
been intended. They define the meaning of the 
whole. 

There are two of these passages to which I will 
draw your more especial attention. The first of them 
I have quoted already, in an earlier part of this 
address. It is Phil. ii. 5-7 : " Have this mind in you, 
which was also in Christ Jesus : who, being in the 
form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an 
equality with God, but emptied Himself, taking the 
form of a servant, being made in the likeness of 
men." Now there has, no doubt, been a good deal 
of discussion as to the interpretation of these verses. 
Even the translation of them is, in one particular, 
not quite beyond question. But if we take them 
with their context, it seems clear that St. Paul is 
intending to illustrate the virtue of humility from the 
self-humiliation of his Lord. For this purpose he 
refers back to the pre-incarnate Son, who was, he says, 



140 The Faith of Centuries. 

eternally " in the form of God " — who shared the 
essential attributes of God— -but who took upon 
Himself the form of a bond-servant and died a 
malefactor's death. Such would seem to be the 
natural meaning of the verse. But even if we suppose 
the allusion in the first clause to be not to the pre- 
incarnate Son but to the incarnate Christ, on whose 
head rested all the attributes of Deity, but who for 
our sakes refrained from making any use of them ; 
or even if we keep in the next clause the translation 
of the Authorised Version, and render, " He thought 
it not robbery to be equal with God," — it remains 
impossible to escape the inference that the Apostle 
looked upon the Son as equal with the Father.* 
Through all ambiguities, if there be any, his faith 
shines out bright and clear. And observe the natural 
manner in which this allusion to his faith is made. 
He does not introduce the eternal equality of Christ 
with the Father as an article of belief which was 
peculiar to himself and his immediate followers, or 
which was new, or which required any kind of justi- 
fication. He introduces it as an admitted fact, as 
part of the well-known and universally acknowledged 
creed of all Christians. It is a postulate about which 
there is no dispute. It is already "current coin." It 
is coin the goodness of which is beyond all cavil. 
The other special passage is from the Epistle to the 
Hebrews. This Epistle is ascribed, by the heading 

* The whole question of this passage is fully discussed by Bishop 
Lightfoot in his commentary on the Epistle to the Philippians. The 
conclusion to which he comes can scarcely fail to commend itself to the 
mind of every impartial reader. Vide especially pp. 131, 132, 137. 



The Divinity of Christ. 141 

attached to it in our Bibles, to St. Paul. But the 
heading, in that form, is not that of the earliest 
manuscripts, which make no statement as to its 
authorship. The Epistle puts forward no claim to be 
St. Paul's, and it is now almost beyond question that 
it is not his. Its date, however, can be fixed with 
a fair amount of certainty. It was written a little 
before A.D. 70, just when the final storm was about to 
break over Jerusalem, when the appalling end of the 
ferocious struggle between Roman and Jew was 
beginning to be in full sight. In Heb. i. 3 we read, 
" Who being the effulgence of His glory, and the very 
image of His substance, and upholding all things by 
the word of His power, when He had made purification 
of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty 
on high." The allusion is, of course, to Christ, and 
in the first half of the verse unquestionably to the 
pre-incarnate Christ. He is put before us as the 
irradiation of the Father's splendour. He is the 
complete and absolute representation of the Divine 
nature. He is the eternal support of all created 
things. The mind of the writer, on the question of 
Christ's Divinity, needs no unveiling. It lies plain and 
open before the eyes even of the simplest. But here 
again I would point out how naturally the confession 
comes in. The ascription of Divine glory is made as 
one to which the general mind of the Church will 
readily consent. There is no suggestion that the 
writer is enforcing a truth which is unwelcome, that 
he is preaching a gospel unknown to, or unpalatable 
to his readers. These two great texts, then, speak 



142 The Faith of Centuries. 

the judgment of the primitive Church. To the 
primitive believer, to teachers and to taught, to 
Apostles and to converts, Christ was not only their 
Saviour, their Shepherd, their Example, their Master, 
their Prophet, their Priest, their King — above and 
beyond all these He was " their Lord and their God." 
And if any of those listening to me should desire to 
push the matter further, to follow it down from the 
immediate time of the Apostles to the age which 
followed, they will find nothing which need cause 
them any reasonable perplexity or distress, " The 
Church," says one of the greatest of ecclesiastical 
historians, " up to the middle of the second century 
deserves the title not merely of the witnessing Church, 
but particularly of the Church witnessing for the true 
Godhead and the true manhood of Christ. This is 
impressed upon us, whether we look at the Church's 
writings, or its liturgic elements in public worship, 
or the principle of its arrangement of festivals, or 
the beginnings of Christian art and characteristic 
usages. Here the Churches of the East and the 
West are at one." * Difficulties have come up only 
when men have expected to find from the first that 
full and complete philosophical statement of doctrine 
which could only come with the lapse of time and 
the exercise of earnest thought, and the discipline 
of controversy and criticism. The history of the 
doctrine of the Person of Christ is throughout the 
history of the attempt by the Church's mind to explain 
and adjust certain received facts. The Incarnation, 

* Domer, Person of Christ (Eng. Trans.), i. 183. 



The Divinity of Christ. 143 

for example, was a truth which, although accepted, 
needed to be appreciated and assimilated. Before 
this could be done with anything approaching fulness 
or adequacy, there were problems which the Church 
was bound to face, and as far as might be to solve. It 
was the pressure of these problems which gave rise to 
speculations sometimes brilliant and profound, some- 
times altogether off the lines, sometimes ending in 
failure, sometimes leading to safe and lasting con- 
clusions. You must read the Fathers of the second 
and third centuries remembering that you have in 
them not the victory but the struggle of Christian 
thought. You will not always find in them the full 
Nicene Creed. You will at times find the guesses 
and errors and short-comings which prepared the way 
for that Creed. But it is not the less true that that 
Creed is stable and trustworthy and consistent and 
acceptable ; it is not the less true that it describes 
and interprets the Scriptural picture in the only way 
that that picture can be sufficiently interpreted and 
described ; it is not the less true that it is the 
product of the Holy Spirit, who was given to the 
Church to be her teacher and inspirer, to lead her 
slowly and gradually, sometimes by the broad high- 
road, sometimes by strange and circuitous by-paths, 
into " all the truth." 

These are some of the reasons, the leading reasons, 
why, as I said at the commencement of my address, 
I dare to commend to you the Church's belief in 
the Deity of Christ as one worthy of reasonable 
men. It comes down to us hallowed as the belief of 



144 The Faith of Centuries. 

centuries. It comes to us endorsed by the many myriads 
who have tested it and found it true. It has been 
the belief not only of the ignorant and the unlettered, 
but of all that has been most learned and most refined 
in Western society in every age of the Christian Era. 
Generation after generation, it has been the golden 
gate through which scholars and philosophers, as well 
as peasants and children, have passed to the vision 
— even in the days of their mortal weakness — of 
the Father. It is the faith to which, come what 
may, the Church of Christ is finally and irrevocably 
pledged. May God establish and strengthen us all in 
it ! May we all come to see in Him who died on the 
Cross the perfect and absolute revelation of the Most 
High God ! May we all of us be brought to welcome 
the Gospel of the Incarnate Saviour as no exaggera- 
tion, no creation of our own fancy, no incredible story ' 
coming out of the mists and vapours of ancient 
times, but as the true light with which the Divine 
mercy blesses us, as the lantern which the Divine 
love offers us to guide our weary and hesitating 
feet ! May God lead us all to the knowledge of 
His grace, to the realisation of His holiness ! May 
He enable us to take upon our lips, not as repeating 
the language of routine, but as the honest judgment 
of our own hearts, the splendid ascription to Christ 
which is made in the famous Creed of which we 
have just been speaking : " God of God, Light of 
Light, Very God of Very God " ! 

W. E. BOWEN. 



VII. 

Gbe IResurrection of our Xoro 3e$us 
Cbrtet an Ibistoric fact. 

THE subject with which we are concerned in the 
present address is the historic character of 
the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the 
dead. Few subjects indeed can be compared with 
it for weighty importance and for practical value in 
the domain of Christian thought. It is the keystone 
of the whole arch. If the historic character of the 
Resurrection of Christ were taken from us, we should 
be deprived of that which in every age of Christendom 
has been the most distinctive pledge and the most 
inspiring proof of the Divine revelation in Christ 
Jesus. 

We know that in the present day there are many 
who deny that this supreme source of Christian joy 
and comfort possesses any true claim to historicity. 
There are many who boldly allege that the story of 
the Resurrection cannot contain literal fact ; that it 
must be a literary figment ; that it was only the 
intense devotion of the disciples of Jesus which 
clothed in the picturesque guise of a wonderful 
narrative their conviction of His undying existence 

145 JO 



146 The Faith of Centuries. 

in another world, and their vague confidence in the 
continuance with them of His spiritual presence 
and power. There are many who would thus reduce 
to the merest shadow the hope that year by year, 
for nineteen centuries, Easter Day has proclaimed to 
the world. 

It has all, we are told, been a beautiful and de- 
luding mirage. It has delighted and encouraged 
wayfarers in life's journey. But the world's day is 
waning. In a cooler, purer air the bright illusion 
vanishes. Man grows wiser ; he learns with better 
philosophy to face the darkness amid the desert 
places, and to find confidence for the solitude of 
a grave from which Christ never rose by a literal 
resurrection. 

If we plead that there must be some grain of truth 
in a narrative like that of the Resurrection, which 
has so nobly corresponded to the common hope of 
the human race, and so exactly fulfilled its highest 
aspirations, we are warned against our self-deception. 
The very fact that it has seemed so abundantly to 
satisfy the universal craving of mankind for some 
assurance of a future state, is used as an argument 
against its historic character. The narrative has 
lived and has been believed, because it has gratified 
men's selfish desires, and because it has afforded a 
nucleus around which their hopes of immortality 
might cluster. It was welcome, and therefore it 
survived. 

If, again, men have grasped at the story of the 
Resurrection, because it seemed to throw light upon 



The Resurrection an Historic Fact. 147 

the inequalities and sufferings of earthly life ; because 
it seemed to promise, on another stage and in a 
higher phase of existence, an explanation — for which 
we now vainly sigh — for all the countless woes of 
tragic bereavement, of blighted reason, of infant 
mortality, of wholesale hideous massacres done by 
famine, pestilence, and earthquake, that stun and 
appal and shock the sentiment that has been fed by 
Christian teaching, — we are told once more that its 
very aptness and hopefulness should warn us against 
accepting the literal truth of the story, and should 
rather make a fair-minded man predisposed to sus- 
pect its historic reality. 

Such, then, are some of the doubts which are 
widely disseminated. Painful and distressing is the 
effect which they are wont to produce among those 
who never had occasion before to consider them 
possible, or who, having never thought or read for 
themselves, imagine at once that their own inability 
to give an answer exemplifies the general defenceless 
character of the Christian position. There arises a 
vague feeling of distrust ; a sense of danger to that 
which is the most priceless possession of the Christian 
faith ; and perhaps, too, an uneasy feeling that, while 
we readily dismiss from serious consideration the tales 
of the supernatural in mediaeval legend, or in the 
early annals of other religions, we are clinging tena- 
ciously to whatsoever in our own religion appears to 
us most full of hope and consolation. 

Now there is no need to give way to false alarms ; 
there is no reason for panic ; there is no room for 



148 The Faith of Centuries. 

discontent, save with our own unhappy ignorance, 
and with our own tendency to neglect the foundations 
of our faith. There is every reason to court a full 
inquiry into the historic character of the story of the 
Resurrection. It is only reasonable that an event, in 
virtue of which Christianity makes the greatest and 
most far-reaching claim upon all the peoples of the 
world, should be subjected to a thorough and com- 
plete and rigorous investigation. 

But investigation is not denial ; inquiry does not 
necessarily bring renunciation ; criticism need not 
beget prejudice. Granted that many, who accept the 
narrative of the Resurrection as historical, accept it 
without inquiry ! But no fewer, in proportion, of 
those who reject it, reject it also without inquiry, 
without pausing to consider the evidence. 

Now it need hardly be pointed out that we are 
not here concerned with those who are content with 
merely denying the Resurrection, with those who deny 
the existence of a personal God and take no interest 
in an event which to Christians has been the grand 
proof of a Divine revelation. Men who regard the 
supernatural as impossible, men who are determined 
to consider an event which transcends experience 
as, ex hypothesi, incapable of being proved by any 
amount of evidence, cannot be expected to accord 
to the narrative of the Resurrection anything better 
than a tolerant disregard. "If the evidence for it is 
strong, then so much the worse for the witnesses ; 
they must either be unveracious, or physically and 
mentally incapable of bearing trustworthy testimony. ,, 



The Resurrection an Historic Fact. 149 

Having first laid down as an axiom that the super- 
natural cannot occur, they have no difficulty next 
in asserting that the Resurrection did not occur. 
The only perplexity in which they find themselves 
involved, is how to account for the rise of the belief 
in the Resurrection of Christ, and how to explain 
away the various elements of the narrative in which 
that belief was embodied, as it appears in the earliest 
literature of the Church. 

Dogmatism, it is to be remembered, is not an 
evil confined to any one camp ; it is not a besetting 
sin of the defenders of Christianity only. The fact 
that a priori assumptions have thus been employed, 
in order to dispose of the historical character of the 
Resurrection, should encourage us with a good heart 
to take up the task of examining the evidence upon 
which the belief is held. 

Let us then ask ourselves the value of the grounds 
upon which we consider the Resurrection of Christ to 
have been a literal historic fact. Is the evidence of 
such a kind as to warrant this belief? Wholly apart 
from questions of doctrine or religious controversy, 
is our belief in the historic character of the Resur- 
rection a reasonable one ? Is it, when we take into 
consideration the remoteness of the time and the 
superstitious character of the ancients, a belief based 
upon reasonable and adequate testimony? 

In all probability, it would not be very easy for 
any of us to state off-hand the grounds upon which 
we accepted the historic character of some famous 
event in ancient times. Suppose, for instance, we 



150 The Faith of Centuries 

were suddenly required to give our reasons for believ- 
ing the story of Alexander's victories to be true, or 
for considering the death of Socrates, or the flight of 
Mahomet, or the career of Joan of Arc, to be historic 
facts ! We should find probably that we had hitherto 
been quite prepared to accept as historic fact what- 
ever had been approved as such by chroniclers and 
historians. These matters had not concerned us very 
deeply ; we were ready to believe them upon the 
authority of those whom we were content to trust. 
But so soon as our interest has been excited, and the 
credibility of this or that event which somehow affects 
us has been challenged, we begin to inquire more 
narrowly into the evidence ; we refer to the most 
ancient records, to those, if possible, that claim to 
be contemporary with the occurrence of the events 
in question ; we begin to take into consideration the 
influence which they are said to have produced 
upon the people of the time, and the impression 
which they left upon the thought and literature of 
the world, or of the countries alleged to be imme- 
diately affected. We are also bound to consider 
whether any objections have been raised to their 
historical character, and whether those objections 
were well grounded, or were of an arbitrary, frivolous, 
and unreasonable nature. 

Of course, if the authenticity of the writings in 
which the event was first described were impugned, 
a preliminary inquiry would be necessary, to de- 
termine as far as possible the credibility of the 
record. And if the event were recorded in various 



The Resurrection an Historic Fact. 151 

authorities, preference would naturally be given to 
those whose literary origin was best known, or gene- 
rally accepted. 

In dealing with events which occurred at a very 
remote time, we should not expect to obtain the 
same amount of evidence that would be available 
for comparatively modern events. But we are able, 
in looking back to a distant period, to form a good 
judgment of the influence produced by a given event 
or personage upon subsequent generations ; and we 
can compare the evidence for an event which is 
universally accepted as historical with the evidence 
for an event whose historicity has been doubted. 
Moreover, it is only fair to bear in mind that super- 
stition is considered to have been more general in very 
ancient times than it is now, and that the occurrence 
of anything supernatural, if it makes any claim to be 
regarded as historically true, needs to be supported 
by evidence of strong and varied character. 

(1) When we come to examine the evidence for 
the Resurrection of our Lord, we turn naturally to 
the evidence which is furnished by the writings of 
the New Testament. And here, first of all, without 
taking into consideration any critical question of date 
or authorship raised by those writings, we cannot 
fail to observe the position which is assigned in 
them to the subject of the Resurrection. In the 
narrative of the Gospels it occupies a most promi- 
nent place. It is an event of surpassing importance. 
It constitutes the climax of the Gospel story. The 
account of it and of the attendant circumstances 



152 The Faith of Centuries. 

occupies a large section in each narrative (Matt, 
xxviii. ; Mark xvi. ; Luke xxiv. ; John xx., xxi.). 
It is not treated as the supernatural embroidery of 
the main history, such as we find introducing a 
disturbing effect in the historical value of the Second 
Book of Maccabees. It constitutes in itself the 
backbone of the narrative. The narrative of the 
ministry, the parables, the miracles, the Passion, the 
Crucifixion of our Lord, lead up to this supreme 
event. And yet there is no appearance of exaggera- 
tion, there is no inflated language employed in the 
description of the Resurrection or of the subsequent 
manifestations. The style of the Gospel narrative 
is just as simple and unadorned in the account of 
the Resurrection as it is elsewhere. There is no 
straining after effect. To the writers it was appa- 
rently a simple fact on a level with the rest of 
the narrative. The readers of the narrative required 
the same sober language in the description of the 
crowning fact preached by the first messengers of 
the Gospel, as in the account given of far less im- 
portant features in the life of Jesus. 

Similarly, in the Epistles, the writers assume that 
their readers are well acquainted with the fact of 
the Resurrection, as constituting with the death of 
Christ the historic basis upon which the Christian 
system rested. They are evidently not under the 
impression that the fact of the Resurrection needed 
any special vindication. In the sermons and speeches 
of the Apostles, as recorded in the Acts, the historic 
character of the Resurrection is evidently employed 



The Resurrection an Historic Fact. 153 

as the argument of defence for the early Christians, 
which their opponents dared not contradict, and could 
not overthrow (cf. Acts ii. 31, 32 ; iv. 10, 33 ; xvii. 18 ; 
xxiii. 6 ; xxv. 19). 

The story of the Resurrection must evidently, 
then, be distinguished carefully, e.g., from the narrative 
of the appearance of a heavenly messenger (Luke 
xxii. 43), or from that of the sound of a voice from 
heaven, confirming the words of Jesus (John xii. 28). 
These were subordinate events in the narrative. No 
appeal was ever made to them or to those like 
them, in order to proclaim the Divine character 
of the revelation in Jesus Christ. The preachers of 
Christ rested the weight of their appeal upon that 
which was, in their opinion, equally fundamental and 
incontrovertible. 

(2) Turning next to the consideration of the 
evidence supplied by the New Testament writings, 
when subjected to a narrower criticism, we need to 
remind ourselves that the New Testament consists 
of many separate writings. The testimony therefore 
of the New Testament is not that of a single voice, 
but of many voices. 

Now as time goes on, as fresh discoveries of early 
Christian literature furnish a wider field of comparison, 
and closer study and long experience tend to correct, 
or qualify, or uphold, the earlier generalisations of 
New Testament scholars and critics, we become more 
and more confirmed in the opinion that the great 
mass of the New Testament writings may, without 
hesitation, be ranked as first-century literature ; in 



154 The Faith of Centuries. 

other words, that they spring from the first two 
generations of Christian believers. 

Criticism seems satisfied that the composition of 
the Gospels belongs to the latter part of the first 
century. The claim that the Fourth Gospel is the 
writing of " the disciple whom Jesus loved " has not 
been overthrown. Even when admitting the doubts 
that have been felt as to its authorship, we may 
notice that very few would now be prepared to assign 
its composition to the third century. The result of 
recent minute research has been to bring the date 
of Johannine writing much nearer to that which has 
traditionally been ascribed to it. 

The narratives of the Resurrection in the four 
Gospels differ, both in the general characteristics of 
their literary treatment, and in the various details of 
their description. There are certain discrepancies in 
the accounts which, while constituting a minor difficulty 
of exegesis, prove conclusively the independence of 
their witness. On the other hand, their general agree- 
ment, in the main outline of the narrative, indicates 
the existence of a well-known framework of Gospel, 
underlying the work of the four Evangelists, pre- 
ceding the period of their composition, and presumably 
embodying the sum of Christian teaching that was 
employed by the Apostles and their followers in their 
earliest missions. The manifold testimony of the 
Gospels, therefore, may confidently be claimed as 
furnishing us with evidence (going back to the middle 
of the first century) as to the belief in the historic 
character of the narrative of the Resurrection. 



The Resurrection an Historic Fact. 155 

This result is confirmed by what we find in St. 
Paul's writings. For, while we find numerous allu- 
sions to the Resurrection of Christ throughout all 
his Epistles, they are nowhere more explicit than 
in those very Epistles which are universally admitted 
to have been written by St. Paul — the Epistles to the 
Roman, the Corinthian, and the Galatian Churches. 
In his First Epistle to the Corinthians, written, as 
is generally supposed, about the year 57 A.D., the 
Apostle recalls to the recollection of his readers in 
that Church the substance of the teaching which 
he had some years previously given them respecting 
numerous important topics, and among them the 
subject of the Resurrection. When, then, he enume- 
rates the evidence for our Lord's rising from the dead 
(chap, xv.), he goes over the facts which had been 
reported to him, and which he apparently systematic- 
ally delivered to the Churches : " I delivered unto 
you first of all that which also I received, how that 
Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures ; 
and that He was buried ; and that He hath been 
raised on the third day according to the Scriptures ; 
and that He appeared to Cephas ; then to the Twelve ; 
then He appeared to above five hundred brethren 
at once, of whom the greater part remain until now, 
but some are fallen asleep ; then He appeared to 
James ; then to all the Apostles ; and last of all, 
as unto one born out of due time, He appeared to 
me also. . . . Whether then it be I or they, so we 
preach, and so ye believed " (1 Cor. xv. 3-1 1). 

Such had been the teaching of St. Paul when he 



156 The Faith of Centuries. 

first preached to the Corinthians, about the years 
51 to 53. Within little more than twenty years from 
the time of the Crucifixion, we thus have definite 
proof that St. Paul proclaimed as undoubted historical 
facts the Resurrection of Christ, and His appear- 
ances to the Apostles and to more than five hundred 
disciples, of whom the greater number were still 
living when he wrote. 

In his other Epistles, written about the same time, 
St. Paul is almost equally explicit. In his Epistle 
to the Romans his opening words insist upon the 
fact that the Divine Sonship of Jesus Christ has been 
" declared with power ... by the resurrection of the 
dead " (i. 4). The Christian faith in God is in One 
" that raised Jesus our Lord from the dead " (iv. 24). 
He encourages the Roman converts with the words, 
" But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from 
the dead dwelleth in you, He that raised up Christ 
Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal 
bodies through His Spirit that dwelleth in you " 
(viii. 11). In his Epistle to the Galatians he begins 
with the statement of his own apostleship, as being 
" not from men, neither through man, but through 
Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised Him 
from the dead" (i. 1). 

It would be easy, if space permitted, to multiply 
references to the Resurrection in St. Paul's other 
Epistles. But it will be sufficient at this point to 
mention also the testimony of other writings, which, 
if their authorship has been called in question, are 
yet undoubtedly of distinct origin and belong to 



The Resurrection an Historic Fact. 157 

the literature of the first century A.D. Kg. 1 Pet. i. 3 : 
" Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, who according to His great mercy begat us 
again unto a living hope by the Resurrection of Jesus 
Christ from the dead." Rev. i. 5 : " Jesus Christ, 
who is the faithful witness, and the first-born from 
the dead." Heb. xiii. 20 : " Now the God of peace, 
who brought again from the dead the Great Shepherd 
of the sheep." Many similar statements could, if it 
were necessary, be adduced from other passages in 
the Epistles. 

Nothing, then, can be more certain than (a) that, in 
less than twenty-five years from the Crucifixion, a 
knowledge of the Resurrection of Christ as an historical 
fact existed in the Churches of Jerusalem, Corinth, 
Rome, and Asia Minor, being based upon the testimony 
of the Apostles, and confirmed by appeal to living 
witnesses ; and (J?) that it formed a principal feature 
in the allusions to the work of Jesus Christ to be 
found in the literature of widely differing character 
belonging to that century. 

It is, as Paley a century ago rightly insisted, 
" completely certain that the Apostles of Christ and 
the first teachers of Christianity asserted the fact " 
of the Resurrection. Nor could language express 
the position of the first Christians more directly and 
concisely than that which is employed by St. Paul, 
when he says, "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth 
Jesus as Lord, and shalt believe in thy heart that 
God raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved " 
(Rom. x. 9). 



158 The Faith of Centuries. 

(3) Testimony to the same effect is furnished from 
a different quarter. The primitive worship and 
institutions of the Christian Church will speak to 
some minds in more convincing language than written 
words. The observance of " the first day of the 
week " by the earliest Christians commemorated the 
rising of Jesus from the dead. This was the 
Christians' sacred day, on which they assembled 
together for worship (Acts xx. 7) ; this, we may be 
almost certain, was "the Lord's day" of Rev. i. 10. 
This belief is recorded in one of the earliest non- 
Canonical Christian writings : " Wherefore also we 
keep the eighth day for rejoicing, in the which also 
Jesus rose from the dead" (Ep. Barnab., cap. 15). 

The first day of the week was neither the Sabbath 
of the Jews, which the first Christians and our Lord 
Himself had always religiously observed, nor the day 
of His crucifixion, which, if His witness had termi- 
nated with His death, might conceivably have become 
to Christians the most sacred day of the week. But 
it was a new day set apart by Christian usage from 
the very first. All primitive tradition associated its 
observance with the belief in the Lord's rising upon 
that day. Neither has any other satisfactory expla- 
nation of its observance been advanced. 

The same may be said of the Christian festival of 
Easter, which commemorated the Resurrection of the 
Lord. The honour in which this day was held, and 
the sanctity assigned to it as the anniversary of this 
greatest event, led to disputes within the Church, 
early in the second century, respecting the right day 



The Resurrection an Historic Fact. 159 

of its celebration. The most joyous of the Christian 
festivals commemorated, not the Jewish Passover, 
but " that first day of the week " after the Passover, 
when the Paschal Victim that was slain was believed 
to have been raised from the dead. 

Once more, the two sacraments of the Christian 
Church were connected, even from the Apostles* times, 
with the commemoration of the Resurrection. The 
Holy Eucharist which showed " the Lord's death till 
He come" (1 Cor. xi. 26) was a reminder also of 
the triumph over the grave. The rite of Christian 
baptism was a symbol of the raising of Christ from 
the dead " by the glory of the Father " (Rom. vi. 4). 

(4) As we attempt to place before ourselves the 
testimony which is supplied by St. Paul and the 
early Church, we cannot, I think, escape the conclusion 
that, when they speak of the Resurrection of Christ, 
they speak of a physical rising of the crucified Jesus 
from the grave. We have not to do with a pictorial 
treatment of spiritual ideas, but with an actual and 
literal historic fact. The historic fact of the dying of 
Christ is coupled with the equally historic fact of the 
rising of Christ from the dead. The two are, as it 
were, co-ordinate literal events. As mentioned, for 
instance, by St. Paul in 1 Cor. xv. 3 ff., they cannot 
be separated from one another ; they cannot denote, 
the one & physical dtdAh, the other an zVfez/ resurrection. 

It has doubtless been objected that, as St. Paul 
reckons among the appearances of the Risen Lord 
the occurrence of a supernatural manifestation to 
himself on the road to Damascus, the whole series 



160 The Faith of Centuries. 

of appearances may therefore have been merely 
subjective, or wanting in "objective reality." But, 
without going into the character of this manifestation 
to St. Paul, we may certainly infer from St. Paul's 
own account of the occurrence, that he himself was 
strongly impressed with its objective character. He 
is well aware, as we may gather from 2 Cor. xii. I ff., 
of the mystery which surrounded the nature of the 
glorified body of the Risen Lord. But it would 
appear that, while he was convinced of the objective 
character of the appearances to the Twelve and to 
the Five Hundred, to Cephas and to James, he could 
not resist the impression that the appearance which 
he had himself witnessed was equally a physical and 
objective one. The historic character of the other 
manifestations is thus not affected by the mention 
of the appearance vouchsafed to the Apostle on the 
road to Damascus. On the contrary, the conviction 
that he had " objectively " seen the Risen Lord is 
implied by his placing his own experience in the 
same category with the appearances for which the 
testimony was well known and generally accepted. 

(5) Those who have supposed that the description 
of the Resurrection and of the ten or eleven recorded 
manifestations of the Risen Lord can be accounted 
for, on the supposition that the first Christians 
expressed in the form of the Resurrection narrative 
their deep conviction of their Lord's permanent 
spiritual existence, can hardly have faced the diffi- 
culties of the supposed case. 

A group of Galilean fishermen and peasants, over- 



The Resurrection an Historic Fact. 161 

whelmed with consternation and despondency on 
account of their Master's death as a malefactor, are, 
we are asked to believe, able, by a process of abstract 
speculation, to translate their vivid conception of His 
spiritual immortality into a series of lifelike scenes 
containing the description of the rising and reap- 
pearance of their Lord in different places, to different 
people, under different conditions ! These scenes, 
according to such a view, would be allegorical ; and 
we are invited to believe that this allegorical descrip- 
tion could, in twenty years from the time of our 
Lord's death, have taken so strong a hold upon the 
imagination of the first Christians, that it was possible 
for the Apostles themselves to appeal to it as a 
record of actual facts, and apparently to be themselves 
convinced that their own allegory was literal history. 
The Apostles were not impostors. No one whose 
opinion has been worth any consideration has ever 
called in question the honesty and integrity of the 
first preachers of the Gospel. And yet how could 
St. Paul have appealed to the testimony of nearly 
three hundred living witnesses of the Resurrection of 
Jesus, if the story of the Resurrection had been only a 
speculation, and if the accounts of the Lord's varied 
manifestations had only presented different aspects 
of an abstract religious idea ? Once more, is it likely 
that St. Paul, whose object in I Cor. .xv. was to 
base the doctrine of the general resurrection upon 
the fact of the Resurrection of Christ, would have 
appealed to an event which he was not convinced was 
historically true ; or, in support of it, would have 

II 



1 62 The Faith of Centuries. 

adduced an array of testimony on which he could not 
absolutely rely? If St. Paul, who had many foes, had 
thus referred in categorical terms to a literal Resurrec- 
tion, to be proved by the evidence he adduced, and if 
all the time he meant a series of imaginary scenes 
allegorically descriptive of the state after death, he 
could hardly have escaped the charge of distorting 
facts and deluding the Church. 

But there is no suggestion made of any wilful 
distortion of facts, nor of any fraudulent and inten- 
tional fiction. And if so, the only possible alternative 
to accepting the Resurrection as historic, is to assume 
the rapid formation of a series of fables by a 
credulous group of people prone to superstition, 
in consequence either of the hallucinations of a few 
ecstatic visionaries, or of the predisposition of the 
masses to expect this particular form of supernatural 
manifestation, the rising of the Christ from the dead. 

(6) But, if we refer to the accounts in the Gospels 
(and these are either to be accepted as literal, or ex- 
plained in some other way), there is no room for the 
theory of hallucinations. Excited feelings and eager 
enthusiasm will often carry away large numbers into 
extravagant action ; and the same causes will pro- 
duce in a few individuals a predisposition to halluci- 
nation, to declare that they see things which are not 
present or are non-existent, and therefore cannot be 
seen. But the same hallucination will not present 
itself to twelve people at the same time ; still less to 
five hundred. Moreover, it is most expressly stated 
that in the case of the disciples there was no pre- 



The Resurrection an Historic Fact. 163 

disposition whatsoever towards imagining the presence 
of a Risen Christ or expecting Him to reappear. 

It is possible that an imagination of His presence 
might have developed itself in a few cases after some 
interval of time. But after the interval of only one 
day, there was no room for so great a revulsion 
of feeling from that of intense depression and bitter 
disappointment to that of joy and courage. With 
many of the disciples it is clear that their hope 
in His Messiahship had vanished when He died 
upon the cross (Luke xxiv. 21). The women of the 
company started out to embalm the corpse. On 
finding the tomb empty, they were startled and 
frightened. Mary Magdalene, to whose excited feel- 
ings a somewhat frivolous phase of scepticism has 
ventured to attribute the origin of the so-called 
Resurrection visions, had herself, according to the 
narrative, no expectation that He would rise from 
the dead. The empty tomb suggested to her the pur- 
loining of the body (John xx. 1, 2, 15). Though our 
Lord had predicted His rising again, the disciples never 
expected it to take place. They had not understood 
the. meaning of our Lord's words (Mark ix. 9, 10; 
Luke xviii. 33, 34). Not even St. Peter and St. John 
were prepared to hear that the tomb was empty (John 
xx. 3-8). The announcement that He had risen was 
received with sad incredulity. The words of the 
women who first met Him and brought the news were 
received as " idle talk " ; the Apostles " disbelieved 
them" (Luke xxiv. 11). Even after the appearance 
of our Lord to the ten Apostles St. Thomas was 



164 The Faith of Centuries. 

not prepared to accept the statement of the others. 
Nothing would convince him but the evidence of 
his own senses of sight and touch (John xx. 25). 
The event was so unexpected, so amazing, so sudden, 
that many at first doubted. The early Christian 
account, preserved in Mark xvi. 14, reports that our 
Lord " upbraided them with their unbelief and hard- 
ness of heart, because they believed not them which 
had seen Him after He was risen." 

We are sometimes told that the story might be 
explained if we attached the proper weight to the 
prevalent superstitions of the time, and to the popular 
predisposition to believe in the rising of a man from 
the dead. This, however, is an assertion which, 
although freely hazarded, is totally without founda- 
tion. The belief in the resurrection was maintained 
by the Pharisees ; it was taught by their Rabbis, and 
was generally accepted by the devout Jews and by 
the common people. It was not, however, a belief 
universally accepted by the Jews ; it was not accepted 
by the Sadducees — that is to say, by the whole party 
to which the high priest and the leaders of the Jewish 
aristocracy belonged (Acts iv. 1 ff. ; xxiii. 8). 

The prevalent belief in the Resurrection was a 
belief in the general rising of the dead at the last 
day (John xi. 24 ; 2 Mace. vii.). There was nothing 
in the Jewish teaching of the Resurrection, nor in the 
Jewish teaching respecting a Messiah, which would 
lead a devout Jew to construct an imaginary story of 
an individual's rising from the dead, or to fabricate 
an account of visions of his reappearance for a period 



The Resurrection an Historic Fact. 165 

of forty days. There is nothing in the pre-Christian 
Messianic literature which would in any way suggest 
this development of the narrative of Jesus. If the 
whole story were a literary invention, it was a new 
and original one. 

It is true that, when our Lord wrought great 
miracles, the common people thought it could only 
be explained on the supposition that one of the great 
prophets had risen from the dead ; while the guilty 
conscience of Herod ascribed the works of Jesus to 
the Forerunner whom he had put to death (Mark 
vi. 14 ; Luke ix. 19). 

But it is one thing to account for wonderful pheno- 
mena by vague general talk about the reappearance 
of a dead saint ; it is quite a different thing to 
describe the reappearance of one who was dead, and 
to recount, with a minute reference to details respect- 
ing people and things, which could easily be put to the 
test, the manifestations of One who was alive again. 
For this there was no precedent in previous literature. 
The stories of Enoch and Elijah related to times too 
remote from the procuratorship of Pilate to supply the 
basis for a whole tissue of imaginary events, woven 
into a consecutive tradition during the ten or twenty 
years that followed the Crucifixion. Nor is there any 
resemblance between the stories of Enoch and Elijah 
and that of the death and resurrection of our Lord. 
The narrative of the Resurrection was unique. It 
had no parallel. You may ransack all pre-Christian 
Jewish literature, and not find anything to prepare 
men's minds for the announcement of such an event. 



1 66 The Faith of Centuries. 

(7) No review of the subject would be complete 
without a reference to the joint evidence furnished 
(a) by the empty grave, and (b) by the change in the 
demeanour of the disciples. The grave had been 
sealed ; a watch had been set over it. But on " the 
first day of the week " the stone had been rolled 
away, the body had disappeared. How was the 
empty grave to be accounted for ? Our Lord's 
enemies spread the report that the disciples came 
by night and stole the body away while the guard 
slept (Matt xxviii. 1 1-15). But, according to that 
explanation, how did the narratives of the Lord's 
appearances arise and take shape? And how can 
the unwillingness of the Apostles to believe that 
the tomb was empty, be understood, except on the 
impossible supposition of fraudulent imposture by the 
Apostles ? How, again, on any such hypothesis, 
can the total change of attitude in the Apostles, from 
cowardice to courage, from craven flight to heroic 
self-sacrifice, be explained ? 

In modern times the suggestion has been made 
that our Lord only swooned away, and did not die 
upon the cross, but that He recovered in the cool air 
of the rock-hewn tomb. It might be enough to reply 
that His opponents were convinced of His death ; that, 
in framing their own excuses, they testified to His 
death (Matt, xxviii. 13) ; and that, in appealing to 
Pilate for a guard, they were evidently assured He 
was no longer alive (Matt, xxvii. 63). It is certain, 
from the words of Felix (Acts xxv. 19), that in later 
days the enemies of the Christians were as absolutely 



The Resurrection an Historic Fact. 167 

convinced of His death as were the Christians them- 
selves. But even if, for argument's sake, the sugges- 
tion were for a moment conceded, are we anywhere 
nearer to an explanation of the narrative which tells 
of the stone's being rolled away, or of the appearances 
made to different people in various localities ? Does it 
in the least explain how a man who had been tortured 
and scourged and ill-treated, nailed to a cross and 
suspended in torture for a day, and pierced deeply 
in the side with a spear, could in thirty-six hours 
have revived sufficiently, first, to disengage Himself 
from the clothes, in which His body was swathed, 
wound up with a glutinous " mixture of myrrh and 
aloes, about a hundred pound weight " (John xix. 39) ; 
then, from within, to remove the great mass of stone 
which lay without the cave, so heavy that two or 
three women, on the outside, felt themselves unable 
to move it (Mark xvi. 3) ; and, finally, to transfer 
Himself from place to place with rapidity and ease ? 
The whole supposition is too absurd to be taken 
into serious consideration. And even if it were 
otherwise, what, we may ask, according to this 
theory, became of the Lord after His reappearance ? 
Where did He eventually die ? How are the joy 
and courage of the Apostles to be explained, if, 
while proclaiming His Resurrection, they knew that 
He was ending His days in some hiding-place 
or fastness among the mountains ? The whole 
theory is a gratuitous rewriting of the evidence, 
and utterly breaks down. 

The reanimated courage of the Apostles, their 



1 68 The Faith of Centuries. 

transfigured conduct, practically disposes of these 
and similar wild suppositions. They had been con- 
vinced that He died upon the cross. They had 
become convinced that He rose and was alive. 
That conviction filled them with joy and with a new 
inspiring belief in the Divine Father's mercy and 
love toward all mankind. 

(8) We should probably be travelling beyond our 
limits, if we here considered the evidence supplied by 
the teaching of the Christian Church. But it must 
fairly be taken into account. The history of the 
Church dates from the Resurrection, to which from 
the first it testified. It was not abstract doctrine, 
but historic fact, that, according to the Apostles, 
constituted the foundation of the Christian Church. 
It was not our Lord's sayings, nor His miracles, 
but His rising from the dead, which was regarded 
from the earliest time as the keystone of the Gospel 
proclamation. 

With this agreed the teaching both of the Cross 
and of the Ascension, and the Christian belief in the 
Second Coming of our Lord (Acts i. n). With this 
agreed the belief in the future resurrection through 
Jesus Christ. " For if we believe that Jesus died and 
rose again, even so them also that are fallen asleep in 
Jesus will God bring with Him" (i Thess. v. 14). 

As part of a Divine revelation to mankind, the 
Resurrection proclaimed the true calling of human 
nature. It was a "sign" (arjfietop): it proclaimed a 
higher law of nature, which is the law of God, for the 
children of the human race. Christ has become to 



The Resurrection an Historic Fact. 169 

us "the firstborn from the dead" (Col. i. 18). He is 
the "second Adam " (1 Cor. xv. 22, 45 ; Rom. v. 15). 

Brief and disjointed as it has been, the investigation 
of the evidence shows conclusively the strength of 
the Christian belief. The facts which we have had 
under consideration can neither be understood on 
the supposition that the Lord remained in the grave, 
nor on the supposition that He did not die upon 
the cross. 

The literary evidence is practically the evidence of 
contemporaries. The writers are various ; their in- 
tegrity of purpose is not called in question. The 
event to which they testify profoundly influenced 
opinion ; it left an indelible mark upon customs and 
institutions ; it formed the basis of the most spiritual 
and progressive religion in the world's history. Un- 
intelligible when viewed by itself, its significance and 
its probability can only then be rightly estimated, 
when it is regarded as the crowning triumph of a 
unique life. The Resurrection of Jesus is the con- 
summation of a life which claimed to be from heaven. 
He who rose from the dead foretold the manner of 
His death, and forewarned His disciples of His 
Resurrection. The evidence for the Resurrection is so 
strong that we must make our choice between its 
being historically true, or the most successful and 
stupendous imposture that has ever deluded the 
world. Yet no one who candidly studies the New 
Testament, or fairly investigates the history and 
teaching of the Church, will be prepared to associate 



ijo The Faith ot Centuries. 

with its foundation, or with its Founder, the baseness 
and immorality of imposture. 

The conclusion, to which we are brought by this 
brief rehearsal of the evidence, is that no believer in 
a loving and personal God need hesitate to assert his 
conviction, that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from 
the dead was a literal and historic fact. 

H. E. Ryle. 



VIII. 

Sin* 

THERE are two subjects which run side by side 
through Scripture and through history. They 
are the wrong-doing and suffering of man, and the 
Divine method whereby he may be lifted up into 
the true life for which he was originally constructed. 
These subjects are called in Biblical language Sin and 
the Atonement. They must be studied together in 
the light of Scripture and experience. The facts of 
Evil have to be faced, traced, and analysed before the 
need or nature of the Atonement can be appreciated 
and discussed with advantage. It is to the first of 
these that attention is now to be called. 

I. Biblical Names for Sin. — The varied aspects of 
evil can be clearly gathered from the names by which 
it is designated in the Hebrew Old Testament.* At 
least ten words are used to describe it. (i) There is 
the ordinary word translated evil, which stands for 
both physical and moral evil — in other words, for 

* A full account of these pictorial words is given in Old Testament 
Synonyms (Nisbet). 

171 



172 The Faith of Centuries. 

what we suffer, and for what we do. The first of 
these is always regarded in Scripture as inflicted 
by Divine permission, and according to the laws of 
creation ; the second is wrought against the Divine 
permission, and is opposed to law. (ii) There is the 
word usually translated sin, which literally means to 
miss the mark, A word of similar meaning is used in 
the Greek Testament for the same purpose. This 
gives an important view of wrong-doing as a failure to 
carry out the original intention of the Author of our 
being, (iii, iv) There are words which signify wrong 
or distortion. These point to the fact which the 
English language also illustrates — that when we do 
evil our nature has a moral twist, and is wrung out of 
its right or straight course. A wrong line is a crooked 
line, (v) There is a word which signifies transgression , 
i.e. the stepping over the boundary and going into 
forbidden ground, (vi, vii, viii, ix) There are words 
which signify rebellion, unrest, wearisomeness, and 
vanity or emptiness, (x) There is one other word, 
which stands for guilt, i.e. the effect produced by 
wrong-doing on the mind and heart of Him who is 
always represented in Scripture as the moral Governor 
of the world. In the Greek Testament the most 
notable words signify failure, ungodliness, unrighteous- 
ness, lawlessness, mischief, discord. 

The meaning of these various words is illustrated 
at every turn in the Bible, through history, biography, 
proverb, and direct instruction. No book or collection 
of books sets forth so fully and with so much candour 
the dark side of life, national, personal, and racial ; 



Sin. 173 

and if it were not for the stream of gracious interven- 
tion which runs through this dreary waste, the Bible 
would be the saddest book ever written. 

II. The Fall. — But we must look beneath the 
surface to find the root of this detestable thing which 
we call Sin. Scripture gives us, not the origin of evil 
in the universe, but the history of wrong-doing in the 
human race. We turn to the third chapter of Genesis, 
the authority of which — in conjunction with the 
surrounding chapters — is taken for granted all through 
the Bible. Here we have a picture of our first parents 
in their original innocence, but possessed of a com- 
posite nature ; children of the dust, and yet the 
offspring of God. A subtle being, in the form of a 
serpent, awakens in the woman's mind discontent, 
distrust, disobedience. At his suggestion she yields, 
breaks the law of her Creator, forsakes the path of 
righteousness (which is loyal love), and yields to the 
desires of her flesh and of her mind. Hence came 
death, moral and physical, the mind fatally acting 
on the body, at one of the most critical moments 
in history. Man having become a law-breaker is 
alienated from the Law-giver, flies from Him, hides 
from Him, neglects Him, rejects Him. This is the seed 
from which the whole crop of human failure sprang. 

It is to be observed that Scripture settles the matter 
not theoretically but historically. We naturally at 
this late age of human history approach it from 
another point of view. We find ourselves burdened 
with a hereditary tendency to go wrong. We know 



174 The Faith of Centuries. 

what is right, as Horace once said, and we approve of 
what is right ; yet we weakly yield to what is wrong. 
Our nature is out of gear or out of balance. The 
animal part is disproportionately strong ; the spiritual 
or God-like disproportionately weak. To do what 
is right, true, pure, unselfish, is uphill work to the 
generality of mankind ; the contrary course is down- 
hill and easy. This is what we call proneness to go 
wrong, or — in technical language — " original sin." 

Some students of human nature are inclined to 
think that Good and Evil are co-eternal, and that 
Right and Wrong are as much part of our original 
structure as Spirit and Body are. But a careful 
analysis of human nature will testify that right is 
original, final, and eternal ; and that wrong-doing 
means degeneracy. The witness of every enlightened 
conscience points strongly in this direction, and 
Scripture, which is conscience intensified and guaran- 
teed, confirms this view ; whilst Christ, who is con- 
science embodied and inspired, leaves us without 
doubt on the matter. 

III. Evolution and the Fall. — Those who hold the 
doctrine of evolution either as a working hypothesis 
or as a proved law find it hard to account for the 
moral facts of human nature. They have to start 
with the belief that the first contemporary male and 
female specimens of the genus homo sprang from non- 
human — not to say " inhuman " — parents, who are 
called for convenience anthropoid apes. As specimens 
of the apes in question have never been discovered or 



Sin. 175 

heard of, it is hard to say what their morality was ; 
but as, on the theory, they were very nearly human 
in other respects, it may be supposed that their moral 
qualities were almost the same as those which our 
first parents possessed, and which by slow degrees 
developed and crystallised into those of the average 
man. 

Another view, however, might be held by the 
evolutionist — namely, that what we call in theological 
language the Fall of Man was the recurrence to that 
anthropoid ape type of morality from which by a 
number of small advances man had extricated himself. 
According to this view, man's moral condition now is 
very much about the same as that of his supposed 
ape ancestors. He had lifted himself up above it, 
but had fallen back into it. 

Neither of these views is in full accord with the 
Biblical narrative, though the latter might seem to 
be in some degree analogous with it. The Scriptural 
story, when we read beneath the surface and between 
the lines, points very clearly to an act of disobedience 
to the Highest, wrought at a suggestion from without, 
and entailing dire punishment on the erring individual 
and on the race. There is much truth in the old 
saying, " Corruptio optimi pessima " (" The higher the 
nature, the greater the fall "). All types in nature lead 
up to man ; but he himself is too often the lowest of 
the low. 

IV. Various Aspects of Sin. — Whatever view we 
take of the origin of human wrong-doing, its aspects 



176 The Faith of Centuries. 

and manifestations are innumerable. In proportion 
as we neglect what is due to our Creator, we fail in 
our duty to our neighbour. The story of Cain and 
Abel speedily follows on the narrative of the Fall. 
Animalism, sensuality, and violence reigned almost 
supreme, though not without remarkable exceptions 
in the early days of human history. The earliest 
records of Babylon are apparently polytheistic ; but 
polytheism is not far from idolatry, and the worship 
of idols leads to degradation in other directions (see 
Rom. i. 20-32). 

If we substitute the word " Evolver " for " Creator " 
in the last paragraph, we shall come to the same 
conclusion. For God is the true Evolver. No evolu- 
tion is really automatic. There is Power and Plan 
and Provision behind it. You cannot get anything 
out of an automatic machine which has not first been 
put into it ; and the machine itself is the product of 
mind. No one who has yielded to the fascination of 
evolutionary doctrine is thereby debarred from the 
worship of God. One living and true Being, incor- 
poreal, impartible, impassible,* is at the back of the 
universe. In Him we live and move and have our 
being. We are His offspring. He can say of us as 
of Israel in old time, " I have nourished and brought 
up children, but they have rebelled against Me" 
(Isa. i. 2). As life is many-sided, so is rebellion, and 
so are the aspects of moral weakness and failure. 
Public life, business life, home life, civilisation, bar- 
barism, riches, poverty, activity, quiescence — all are 

* See the first of our Thirty-nine Articles, 



Sin. 177 

stained and stamped with failure. If the Divine 
Being is possessed of consciousness, thought, and 
sensitiveness to the ways of human beings — and we 
know that this must be so — with what feelings can 
He look down upon the children of men ! 

V. Personal Responsibility. — If failure is hereditary, 
the question rises whether we are to any extent 
responsible for our own personal short-comings. The 
answer is, Each man is responsible just so far as he 
is free and enlightened. I take it for granted that 
every one is conscious of a certain amount of light and 
of liberty, though he is painfully aware that he cannot 
understand everything, and that his tether is not a 
long one. It is not every one who realises his moral 
inability ; but when he does find it out, it fills him 
with shame. It does seem shocking not to be able to 
do the things which we would. At such a time we 
are inclined to run into extremes and say that we are 
victims of necessity or creatures of impulse. Many 
a man comforts himself in doing wrong by saying 
that he is led by the strongest motive. This word 
" motive " has a good deal to answer for. What is a 
motive ? and where is it ? Is it something outside you 
which awakens an inclination, as an apple rouses a 
boy's desire to possess and eat it ? Or is it something 
within you which makes the desire uncontrollable? 
And after all, have we no means of controlling our 
desires? Has God left Himself altogether without 
witness in this respect ? Is conscience a sham, and the 
will a fiction ? Have we no power available for saying 

12 



178 The Faith of Centuries. 

No to our inclinations ? Let history and experience 
answer. Moral weakness is one thing ; moral inability 
is another. If it is true that I feel a motive, it is also 
true that I choose a course. Human language itself 
(as Aristotle said centuries ago) is so formed that it 
compels us to acknowledge our responsibility. 

But responsibility is a matter of degree. This is as- 
serted in many ways over and over again in Scripture, 
and it commends itself to our reason. We fail in our 
dealings with God and man partly through inherited 
weakness, partly through ignorance, partly through 
environment or surroundings, partly through self- 
formed habits, partly through voluntary actions. I 
am not responsible for my existence, nor for any 
of the tendencies which I brought with me into 
the world. A man cannot help having a desire 
to possess goods, to preserve life, to excel others, to 
resent injuries, to satisfy the sexual instinct ; he may 
be ignorant (either through his own fault or through 
the fault of others) as to the nature and bearing of 
some of these desires ; but he is to a large extent 
responsible for the satisfying them at wrong times, 
under wrong conditions, and on wrong objects. If 
he resists the temptation to yield, he is building up a 
strong character ; if he lets himself be conquered, he 
is sowing the seed of further moral weakness and ruin. 
It is in this way that hunger leads to gluttony, 
sexuality to sensuality, a sense of possession to 
covetousness, and so on. Thus the inherited chain 
of tendency, instead of being broken, is riveted on 
the soul more firmly. The temporary show of 



Sin. 179 

resistance is gradually given up. We yield, yet hate 
ourselves for yielding. At last we even give up 
this hatred. The heart is hardened ; the conscience 
dulled ; the sense of shame deadened ; the will, which 
might have been strengthened and trained for higher 
things, demoralised and destroyed. 

VI. The Tempter. — There is another aspect of sin 
which the story of the Fall includes, which must 
not be overlooked. It brings on the scene that old 
serpent the Devil, whose existence is regarded by 
some with mockery, by others as a grave but 
unsolved problem. From one end of the Bible to 
the other we find that the human race is haunted 
and beset by this mischief-maker. He well earns his 
name of Satan, i.e. antagonist ; Abaddon or Apollyon, 
i.e. destroyer ; and Diabolus, i.e. accuser. Our Lord 
called him both a liar and a murderer, and says that 
" he abode not in the truth." He is also called by 
our Lord " the prince of this world/' whilst St. Paul 
actually designates him as " the god of this age." 

The relation of the spirit-world to our own is very 
obscure. All material objects are conditioned by 
laws of space ; but perhaps the beings whom we call 
spirits are not subject to these laws. We cannot 
point to any spot in the heavens and say that God 
is there rather than here. He is not far from each 
one of us. It is hard to picture up consciousness 
apart from brain, or personality apart from nerve ; 
but in the spirit-world, on the border-land of which 
we dwell, thought and action can be carried out 



i8o The Faith of Centuries. 

without brain, nerve, or limb, and so of course 
without the other elements in the human fabric. 
And yet spiritual beings may have angelic organisa- 
tions capable of being condensed and etherealised— 
capable also of assuming divers forms. One may 
take the form of a dove, another may appear in 
the guise of a serpent, and a third may present 
himself as a man. Whether Satan literally appeared 
to our first parents as a serpent matters little to us. 
At any rate he was there as the Tempter, and this 
role he has kept to ever since. 

I am thankful that the story of the Fall tells us 
that the suggestion to do wrong came from without. 
This fact assures us that evil is not wholly self- 
generated in man. Our first parents were in a 
condition of unstable moral equilibrium ; and it was 
the Enemy that caused the downfall. This opens 
a door of hope to the human race. For if evil 
comes from without, i.e. from the spirit-world, then 
a remedy may also come from that world. More- 
over, man's original responsibility in the matter of 
sin is considerably reduced, though it is not altogether 
done away with. 

Without further speculation on the origin of the 
Fall, it will be best to look to our own case. It is 
clear that a man is not responsible for being tempted. 
His responsibility begins when he harbours any 
suggestion of the Tempter, and it increases when he 
yields. Here the story of Eve is analogous with 
our every-day experience. Our mental processes 
are very much like hers. We are led by the senses 



Sin. 181 

and by the desires, as she was. Sceptical suggestions 
slip into our mind, as into hers. The absence of 
a serpent in a visible form does not make much 
difference. The Evil One uses our natural instincts, 
our ambitions, our friends. Christ said, " Get thee 
behind Me, Satan," not only to the Enemy of souls, 
but also to the most notable of the Apostles when 
his words were Satanic in their influence. 

Many a man and woman says almost in Eve's 
words, "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." 
But ought we to let the serpent beguile us ? Have 
we not eyes ? Have we not understanding ? Ought 
we to let ourselves be drawn almost blindfold into 
temptation? Have we no resisting power? Or if 
we are incapable by ourselves of withstanding 
temptation, is there no source outside ourselves 
from which we may gather strength ? These are 
grave questions. We evidently must not throw the 
whole responsibility of sin on Satan, even though 
the original suggestion may have come from him. 
Undoubtedly the proneness or predisposition to go 
wrong, which we have inherited from our ancestors, 
makes us fall a more easy prey to Satan than we 
should do otherwise. On the other hand, our eyes 
are opened to the wiles and snares of the Evil One ; 
and the experience of the past gives us in this 
respect a salutary lesson which our first parents had 
not a chance of learning beforehand. We talk of 
irresistible temptations, but no temptation is really 
irresistible. There is a way of escape ; and the 
business of life is to find it The theory of self- 



1 82 The Faith of Centuries. 

discipline or self-mastery is as old as the days of 
Greek philosophy. The practice requires help from 
the spirit-world. As Linnaeus said— 

Unless above himself he can lift up himself, 
How poor a thing is man ! 

This power of lifting ourselves above ourselves must 
come from One who is higher, purer, and nobler than 
man. It must come from One who is competent 
to undo the works of the Devil. In fact, we need 
SPIRITUAL INTERVENTION both to enable us to 
overcome the temptations of the world, the flesh, 
and the Devil, and also to incline us with pure hearts 
and minds to follow the Only God. 

VII. Sin Universal. — It needs no Bible to tell us 
that all have sinned and come short of the glory of 
God. Men fail because they have no ideal, or — if 
they have one — because they cannot live up to it. 
They fail at the beginning of life through proneness 
to go wrong, and at the end of life through death. 
History tells us that men failed in the past, and 
experience tells us that they fail in the present. 
What has civilisation done to prevent failure? 
What has legislation ? What has philosophy ? What 
has culture ? The policeman, the gaoler, the soldier, 
even the bunch of keys, is a witness to universal 
failure. Conscience tells men that they have failed. 
The ignorance about God, the shrinking from contact 
with Him, the terrors awakened by the spirit- 
world, the expiatory rites intended to pacify the 
good and evil powers behind nature, the dread of 



Sin. 183 

death and of that which is beyond — these are so 
many witnesses to the failure of the race. 

The religions of the world have been failures. 
They are blind attempts to seek God. No religion 
is worthy of the name which does not begin at the 
other end. God must take the initiative. Give me 
a religion which sets forth God as seeking man. 
Give me a religion which will save the lost ; for I 
am lost. Salvation is the criterion of true religion. 
A God who cannot save is no God. If there is no 
God who can save, life is blank despair. If the 
Author of the human race cares for the race, if 
He sees its condition, if He is what the deepest part 
of my nature demands that He should be, then there 
must be within the infinite stores of His goodness 
and wisdom and power some way of doing something 
to lift up both the race and the individual. 

Where shall salvation be found ? Philosophy says, 
" It is not in me." Education and legislation echo, " It 
is not in us. We can repress by force ; we can instruct 
and make more learned ; we can cleanse the outside of 
the cup and the platter ; but we cannot overcome evil 
with good." The reformer says, " It is not in me." 
Buddha tried, Confucius tried, and other men of modern 
times have tried to purge society, to cleanse the state, 
and to kindle enthusiasm for what is good ; but in vain. 
It is like trying to resuscitate a dead man. The remedy 
must be from on high— not from our equals, but from 
our Author. Through Him alone death can be 
swallowed up in life, failure in victory, selfishness in love. 

R. B. GlRDLESTONE 



IX. 

atonement 

THE doctrine of Sin or Failure, which has been 
discussed in the preceding paper, presupposes 
the existence of a Divine law, standard, or ideal, 
originally impressed on man's inner being, if not 
expressed in words from without. It is only reason- 
able that God should demand of His creatures a right 
use of the gifts and faculties which He bestows, and 
that human beings, possessing as they do special 
endowments, should be expected to live in conformity 
with the Divine tendencies breathed into them. To 
do so is to be in the right ; and with righteousness 
will come harmony and happiness. The facts of 
history and experience, however, testify to the evil 
condition of man. The race has failed to live up to 
God's demands, or, in other words, to fulfil the law of 
its being. Man is a failure, physically, spiritually, 
socially ; and the whole moral world is out of course. 
Each of us has gone astray like a lost sheep ; self has 
taken the place of God ; there is none that doeth 
good — no, not one. Each generation has left a 
legacy of failure to the next, and all human efforts 

184 



Atonement. 185 

to struggle out of this lost condition have proved 
futile. 

I. Intervention i?i Behalf of the Lost. — The Scriptures 
of the Old Testament freely acknowledge this lament- 
able state of things, but they illustrate and foreshadow 
something better. They sparkle with revelations of 
Divine grace ; they abound in definite promises ; they 
record frequent instances of gracious intervention in 
behalf of the helpless and the lost. Some persons 
object to the idea of intervention, as if it were im- 
proper or unnatural, and as if all things had remained 
in a state of monotony or dull iteration, or at best 
automatic advance, from " the beginning " — whatever 
that was. But, as a matter of fact, the more we study 
nature, the more deeply we shall be persuaded that 
both order and variation imply intervention. In this 
respect intervention may be regarded, even by the 
evolutionist, as a necessary complement and counter- 
part to his favourite theory. For whilst the doctrine 
of evolution seeks to formulate the physical aspects of 
variation in relation to orderly development, the other 
doctrine supplies both the plan and the working force 
which secure orderly succession of species in a certain 
direction. All that is unwitting in nature, all that is 
supposed to answer to a blind conatus y is from God. 
" He sent from above, He took me, He drew me out," 
is what every new " kind " in creation might say of 
God, if it could speak. 

If there is mind, plan, purpose, force (in other words, 
intervention), at the back of all which makes up 



1 86 The Faith of Centuries. 

nature, there must be something answering to it at 
the back of the highest and most intelligent type of 
nature as we know it — that is to say, Man. Man is a 
link between creation and the Creator. Physically he 
is allied to the one, spiritually to the other. The failure 
of the human race to live up to its high end is (so 
far as we know) unique ; and remedial intervention 
may be expected to be unique also. If there is a vis 
medicatrix naturce^ which every working man appre- 
ciates when he cuts his hand, it would be strange if 
God made no provision on a large scale for the allevia- 
tion of human sorrow and for the reconstruction of 
human character. 

But away with theoretical discussions ! The thing 
has been done. What the Old Testament foreshadows 
the New Testament records. " The Father sent the 
Son to be the Saviour of the world." . 

II. T lie Person of Christ. — The Lord Jesus Christ 
is set forth in Scripture as in a special and unique 
sense God's Son, and as from eternity a sharer of the 
Divine nature — God of God. He is the Logos or ex- 
pression of the Divine will ; He is the Agent through 
whom all things were made ; to Him belong all the 
things which the Father hath ; whatever the Son did 
must be ascribed to the Father as the originator. 
Accordingly we read that God was in Christ recon- 
ciling the world unto Himself. 

The consistent Unitarian naturally rejects the 
Atonement because he rejects the Deity of Christ. 
He holds that God is essentially an isolated Being, 



Atonement. 187 

and that if He wanted a Son He must create one. 
The true Catholic and Scriptural faith is that loving 
relationship is of the essence of the Godhead, and that 
within the compass of Deity there exist eternally 
the loving Paternity which originates, and the loving 
Sonship which conforms to the originative Will and 
carries it out, and the loving Energy which quickens 
and inspires all creation — in other words, the Father, 
the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Human words ; but 
they express profound truth. 

The Redeemer, whom by the force of Scripture 
and reason we are called upon to recognise as the 
Divine Son, came into this world in the fulness of 
time, and shared our human nature from its initial 
stage of conception and onwards, being born under 
special conditions, as our first parents must have been 
according to any theory. Having thus taken the 
manhood into the Godhead, He lived out this super- 
induced life in a way which no ordinary human mind 
can fathom or words describe. Whilst possessed of 
a double consciousness, because He was perfect God 
and perfect Man, His original nature was in some 
way kept in the background, though never really 
renounced, and so as Son of Man he brought light 
and salvation into the world. 

III. Christ's Teaching about Sin. — Before contem- 
plating the Lord's redemptive work, we had better 
listen to His words, and especially to what He said 
about the nature of that evil thing for which He came 
to provide a remedy. 



1 88 The Faith of Centuries. 

First, He expounded the nature and bearing of God's 
law, and the present and future penalty on disobedience 
to it. Thus He intensified the sense of sin in men's 
hearts, and quickened the power of their conscience. 
Many a one must have gone from His presence to 
seek the Father who seeth in secret, saying, " God be 
merciful to me a sinner ! " 

Secondly, He pointed out that the heart was the 
seat of sin ; that the real root of evil is to be found, 
not in things, but in persons ; and that it springs out 
of self-will and out of a corrupt inclination, whether 
inborn or inbred. 

Thirdly, He spoke in no uncertain terms of Satan 
as the Evil One who had to be faced, fought against, 
and overcome. 

Fourthly, He practically condemned sin by living a 
sinless life. He set an example of perfect holiness. 
His life shows what a true human life ought to be and 
can be when absolutely under the influence of the 
Holy Spirit, both in relation to God and to man. 

Fifthly, He restated the grand doctrine of the 
Fatherhood of God. He enlarged on the sympathy 
of God with lost sinners, and dwelt on His readiness 
to help the helpless. He portrayed God as one who 
took pleasure in giving and in forgiving, and whose 
fatherly nature prompted Him to take the initiative 
in welcoming His erring children back to Himself. 

IV. Christ's TeacJiing about His Atoning Work. — We 
must look in the next place at some special utterances 
of Christ which prepared the way for the thing which 



Atonement. 189 

He was about to do, and which illustrate the wonder- 
ful adjustment of means to ends in the Lord's atoning 
work, as in all other departments of God's operations. 
A study of them will serve to obviate many theoretical 
difficulties which we might at first feel in respect to 
this marvellous intervention in the affairs of man. 

The following are the most notable passages bearing 
on the subject in the Gospels : — 

" I am the Good Shepherd : the Good Shepherd 
giveth His life for the sheep " (John x. 11). 

" The Son of Man came to give His life a ransom 
for many " (Matt. xx. 28 ; Mark x. 45). 

" My blood is shed for many for the remission of 
sins " (Matt. xxvi. 28). 

"I give My flesh for the life of the world" 
(John vi. 51). 

" The Son of Man must be lifted up : that who- 
soever believeth on Him should not perish, but have 
eternal life " (John iii. 14, 15). 

" Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground, and 
die, it abideth alone : but if it die, it bringeth forth 
much fruit " (John xii. 24). 

With these passages must be taken a series of 
predictive utterances, some private and some public, 
from Matthew xvi. onwards, indicating the things 
which were to happen to Him by the hands of sinful 
men, in accordance with the plan unfolded in the Old 
Testament. 

These verses point to the Death of Christ as a 
voluntary and deliberate act of self-sacrifice. They 
tell us that His death was necessary in order that 



190 The Faith of Centuries. 

certain results should be obtained. Even the mode 
of death, the being lifted up on the Cross, was 
necessary. Death is regarded throughout the Bible 
as the consequence and penalty of sin ; and in order 
that sin might be remitted death must be tasted by 
the Prince of Life. Blood signifies the life, and the 
shedding of blood means the giving up or taking away 
of life. Perhaps some teachers and hymn-writers 
have taken a too materialistic view of the word 
" blood " as it occurs in connection with our Lord's 
death. Others, including Bishop Westcott and Dr. 
Milligan, in correcting this error, have been in danger 
of throwing into the shade the great fact, that whilst 
the sacrifice of Christ was a living sacrifice, yet it 
was also essentially a giving up of His life. The 
Lord brought pardon and redemption and life, not by 
His living, but by His dying. This is plainly taught 
in the passages cited above. So says St. Paul twice 
over, " In Him we have redemption through His 
blood, even the forgiveness of sin " (Eph. i. 7 ; 
Col. i. 14) ; and so St. John says, " The blood [i.e. the 
voluntary blood-shedding] of Jesus Christ cleanseth 
us from all sin" (1 John i. 7). St. Peter also, who 
was once shocked at the idea of the Lord's laying 
down His life, understood it afterwards, and said, 
" Ye are redeemed with the precious blood of Christ, 
as of a lamb without blemish and without spot " 
(1 Pet i. 18, 19). 

Whilst, however, the blood-shedding of Christ was 
voluntary, and so sacrificial, it was not wrought by 
Himself, but by the hands of sinful men. He was led 



Atonement. 191 

as a lamb to the slaughter. He did not shed His 
own blood, or take away His own life, or fasten 
Himself to the Cross. There is the passive side as 
well as the active to be considered. 

Again, although it was necessary that the Lord 
should die, it was by no means needful that He should 
remain among the dead. The Lord was no martyr 
to His convictions, as John the Baptist and St. 
Stephen were. He tasted death. He compares the 
case again and again to that of Jonah, who was 
(typically) buried for three days and nights. He 
hardly ever referred to His coming death, except as 
a necessary and terrible incident in His mission, to 
be followed very shortly afterwards by His resur- 
rection ; and this resurrection was not a recall to the old 
life of humiliation, which would have passed away for 
ever, but was an advance into a life of glorification. 
In respect of His risen condition He is the type and 
the first-fruits of His people's resurrection. Thus the 
death of Christ, and the act of self-sacrifice by which 
He incurred it, must be regarded as absolutely unique. 

Once more, if we consult the various passages 
referred to, we shall find that the self-sacrifice of 
Christ was lovingly undertaken, because it was the 
Father's will, and because — being such — it was laid 
down in the Old Testament programme. All that 
was written had to be accomplished. Here a little 
and there a little, the Spirit of Christ that breathed 
in the Prophets caused them to give utterance to 
certain thoughts which find their one and only 
fulfilment in the Lord's crucifixion. 



192 The Faith of Centuries. 

We must now look for a moment at the solemn 
event itself. 

V. Christ's Crucifixion. — At last the Day came. 
The Paschal Feast was held, and a new rite was 
ordained to keep in everlasting remembrance the 
truth that the Lord's body was given and His blood 
shed for the benefit of mankind. Then followed the 
strange scene in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is 
evident that our Lord was facing something more 
terrible and hateful than ordinary death — something 
which His human nature shrank from and resented. 
But if it must be borne it should be borne, because in 
that case it was clearly the Father's will. Here lies 
the force of the sacrificial idea. Let us pass over the 
series of evil things done by the Jewish clergy and 
men of letters, the heads of Church or State, all of 
which were ingredients in the cup the Lord had to 
drink. And now we come to the Cross. This was 
the vital moment of intervention, when Sin was borne 
and Death tasted. 

" Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the 
sin of the world " (John i. 29). 

" The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us 
all " (Isa. liii. 6). 

"Thus it must be" (Matt. xxvi. 54). 

" Thy will be done " (Matt. xxvi. 42). 

It is at this stage that the accounts of the 
Evangelists are most graphic, most detailed, most 
self- restrained. They just tell the tale and repress 
their own feelings. We get from their pages a strong 



Atonement. 193 

and vivid picture of the whole scene. We see the 
Saviour passive to the outward eye, but active in the 
truest sense, yielding to the meanness and brutality 
of Jew and Roman, yet watchful over the interests 
of His disciples and of His own mother, cheering 
the penitent thief with bright words of assurance, 
mentally surveying the Scriptural predictions till all 
were accomplished, bowed down under the burden 
of the world's sin till no words could express His 
condition but those of the 22nd Psalm, and at length 
committing His Spirit to His Father's hands in the 
act of Death. 

VI. Some Difficulties Considered. — Before consider- 
ing the meaning or interpretation of this sublime 
transaction, we must look for a moment at three 
difficulties which occur to many of us as we think 
the matter over. The first difficulty is owing to the 
comparative littleness of man. Was it worth God's 
while to give His only begotten Son to suffer death 
upon the Cross for such insignificant creatures ? The 
world is a tiny speck amidst the universe of stars. 
What is man that so strange and great a thing 
should be done for him ? One would think that 
the interests of sun, moon, and stars, and all their 
inhabitants, must be at stake before such events as 
the Incarnation and Crucifixion could be contem- 
plated. Some such idea seems to have been in the 
minds of the sacred writers when they ask the 
question, " What is man ? " 

We cannot answer this difficulty fully. It may be 

13 



194 The Faith of Centuries. 

that man is really in a unique position, being on the 
border-land between the animal and the spirit-world, 
and that consequently it was essential to the Divine 
plan and order of creation as a whole that this 
staggering effort should be made. At any rate we 
rejoice in the fact that we have received this blessing 
from God. Though we are only children at present, 
and are unable to solve all the problems in nature 
and in grace, we cling to Him who endured the Cross, 
for He satisfies all our needs and turns our darkness 
into light. 

Another difficulty must be mentioned. If God's 
nature and property is to forgive, why should He 
not do it straight off without the elaborate and 
agonising process which the Biblical doctrine of the 
Atonement involves? The objection is a purely 
theoretical one, and may best be answered by an 
appeal to facts. God's mind is expressed in His 
actions : some of these are direct ; others are wrought 
through agencies which He dictates, orders, inspires, 
or overrules. This is made clear to us by the 
Scriptures, one of the uses of which is to enable 
us to understand the ways of God. Hence it is 
natural that forgiveness should express itself in 
action. Moreover, the Divine Being has many 
attributes, and occupies a complex position with 
regard to man. Accordingly, the publication of an 
edict of universal forgiveness for all sin may not 
be quite so simple an affair as we imagine. Besides, 
what would forgiveness be if it stood alone ? Would 
the proclamation of a free and costless pardon be 



Atonement. 195 

equal in moral weight to the message from the Cross ? 
Would it affect that moral and spiritual change in 
human dispositions which is brought about by the 
Crucifixion ? At any rate we are sure that if the 
sacrifice could have been dispensed with it would not 
have been ordered. Human sin is evidently a more 
serious and terrible thing than we sometimes think. 

A third objection is frequently expressed in such 
words as these : " The whole idea of propitiation is 
heathenish, or at best Jewish." It may be answered 
that even heathenism, in spite of all its darkness and 
distortions, may contain some rudimentary elements 
of truth. The case of the Jew, however, needs to 
be more fully looked at. Undoubtedly the doctrine 
of Redemption has a strongly Jewish aspect and 
colouring. Some passages in the New Testament lead 
us to believe that the particular death which Jesus 
died was specially adapted to the needs of Israel, as 
under the Law of Moses. Christ was made under 
the Law, to redeem them that were under the Law 
(Gal. iv. 4, 5). He redeemed men from the curse of 
the Mosaic Law, being made a curse for them when 
He was hanged on a tree (Gal. iii. 10, 13). His blood 
was shed for the redemption of the transgressions 
that were under the First Covenant (Heb. ix. 1 5). 

It is vain to speculate as to what other way of 
redemption might have been carried out, if there had 
been no Israelites and no Mosaic Law, or if the Son of 
God had come abruptly on the human scene without 
any preparation being made for Him in history, 
type, and prophecy. We have to deal with facts. 



196 The Faith of Centuries. 

Israel's institutions claim to be Divine, and they are 
to a large extent typical and anticipatory. This is 
the case with the whole doctrine of blood-shedding 
and sacrifice which is so often referred to in the 
New Testament. We find in the older Scriptures 
again and again that the blood represents the life ; 
that blood-shedding means taking away life ; that 
blood-presentation means the offering of life ; that 
blood-sprinkling means the personal appropriation of 
the offered life. But all propitiatory offerings of the 
lower for the higher were necessarily imperfect. 
When we turn to the 40th Psalm, we find that the 
four most notable classes of offering in the Law — 
the burnt-offering, the meat-offering, the sin-offering, 
and the sacrificial feast — are put aside ; they are all 
incomplete and unsatisfactory, being contrasts rather 
than images of the true offering. Then, reading the 
psalm in the light of the New Testament, we find 
that Christ takes their place and comes to do His 
Father's will (see Heb. x. 1-10). This Will He yielded 
to in the Garden and accomplished on the Cross. 
Thus we have passed from the Jewish shadow to the 
spiritual substance. 

VII. The Meaning of the Crucifixion. — The work 
of Christ on the Cross may be regarded as a perfect 
example of self-sacrifice, and a complete manifestation 
of God's hatred of sin and love for the sinner. It is 
sometimes spoken of as if it were merely a supreme 
act of martyrdom, or as a wonderful deed of heroism 
intended to ennoble the mind and rouse the enthusiasm 



Atonement. 197 

of the race. But it would effect neither the one nor 
the other if it did not primarily accomplish some 
specific end. If it were a prodigal and gratuitous act, 
dictated by God as an object-lesson for the world, it 
would simply be shocking to the moral sense. What 
the broken lights of the Old Testament indicate 
beforehand must needs be accomplished. There was 
a moral necessity in the matter. It was fitting, 
becoming, due, in order that the purpose of God 
towards the race might be carried out. It was 
adapted to produce the result required ; it was 
adjusted to the whole order of moral government. 
Moreover, it is capable of being tested by experience. 
On the Cross Christ became "our peace," not only 
breaking down the middle wall of partition between 
Jew and Gentile, but reconciling both unto God 
(Eph. ii. 13-18). Sin in all its aspects was dealt with 
there. God's hostility to sin was exhibited in the 
bitterness of the cup which His Son had to drink. 
But in the drinking of it Christ became the medium of 
reconciliation, making it possible for God's fatherly 
Spirit to flow forth into our hearts. Christ crucified 
becomes the antitype of the blood-stained mercy- 
seat, and so the guarantee, the means, the security, 
of man's pardon and acceptance, and justifies God in 
forgiving him and receiving him to Himself for ever 
(see Rom. iii. 24-26). The passages here referred to, 
and others which may be read alongside of them, 
teach that the severance between God and man, 
caused by sin, is done away with primarily on God's 
part, and that He took the initiative, and that the 



198 The Faith of Centuries. 

sacrifice of the Incarnate Son on the Cross may 
be regarded as a " deed " of forgiveness. Here was 
the first great step of reconciliation. All difficulty is 
removed so far as God is concerned. Then man's 
step has to be taken towards God. Here again Christ 
is the medium. Ambassadors for Christ beseech men 
to look at Him and realise the deed done for them. 
When they do so, this is faith ; and if this faith is a 
real one, it carries with it repentance ; and by these 
double doors they enter into peace. " Being justified 
by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord 
Jesus Christ ; by whom also we have access by 
faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in 
hope of the glory of God " (Rom. v. 1, 2). 

VIII. Atonement Representative and Vicarious. — 
Atonement or propitiation, according to the meaning 
and usage of the Hebrew term which stands for it, 
signifies shelter. It does not point to our work, but 
to God's. He is the shelterer. It is something done 
for us, that something else may be done in us and 
by us (see Rom. viii. 3, 4). The atoning medium is 
Christ, the Son of God ; and what He did and bore is 
regarded in Scripture both as representative and as 
vicarious. Four Greek prepositions are used in the 
New Testament to illustrate the effect of Christ's 
death : — 

(i) Aid, because of, e.g. in Rom. iv. 25 He was 
" delivered up becattse of our offences," i.e. because we 
had offended. 

(ii) TJepiy for, concerning, or in respect to, e.g. in 



Atonement. 199 

Rom. viii. 3, "God sent His own Son in the likeness 
of sinful flesh, and for sin," i.e. as a sin-offering. 

(iii) 'Tirep, in behalf of, e.g. 2 Cor. v. 15, "One 
died in behalf of all," i.e. with a view of saving all 
from death. 

(iv) 'Avtl, instead of, e.g. Matt. xx. 28, " The Son 
of Man came to give His life a ransom instead of 
many." 

In one passage (1 Tim. ii. 6) we find that virkp 
and avri are combined, viz. in the expression, " A 
ransom [literally, a vicarious ransom] for all." 

There are also Hebrew prepositions in the Old 
Testament which, though not so numerous, fairly 
illustrate these distinctions.* 

It is quite clear that Christ's sacrifice infinitely 
exceeded all the old types and shadows, in that it 
was {a) voluntary and deliberate, (b) wrought by the 
higher for the lower, and (c) with a full conscious- 
ness of what was needed and aimed at by the Father 
who planned it ; so that the essence of it was 
deliberate submission to an accursed death, in loving 
conformity with the Supreme Mind, with the object of 
restoring a lost race. 

The idea of representation, with which we English 
are so familiar, runs through Scripture. The king 
represented the people ; so did the priest ; so did the 
elders ; so did the sacrifices. David, as champion, 
was the nation's representative. The kinsman who 
redeemed the oppressed represented his relative, and 
so had the right to redeem. 

* See Old Testament Synonyms (Nisbet). 



20o The Faith of Centuries. 

The idea of substitution was also stamped upon 
the Israelitish system, and is still common enough 
amongst ourselves. It may take the form of vicarious 
service or of vicarious suffering. In its simplest form 
it marks natural succession, as when a king reigns 
in the stead of his father. But one man may act 
instead of another in many ways, e.g. in military 
service, in the payment of debts, and in the under- 
taking of responsibility. One man may offer to do 
what another is unequal or unworthy or unwilling 
to do. Thus the one is shielded from toil or from 
penalty by the action of another. 

Though substitution or vicarious action means 
acting or suffering both in the interests of another 
and instead of him, it does not necessarily imply that 
the action or suffering is identical with what the other 
party would have gone through if no one had 
intervened ; but it must at least be equivalent, and so 
satisfactory in the eye of the law or of morality. 

Thus a shepherd watches over his sheep, defends 
them, beats off wolves and robbers, risks his life in 
doing so, but only lays it down if this extreme sacrifice 
is absolutely necessary. 

A man plunges into the water to save another from 
drowning. He succeeds. But he does not necessarily 
or intentionally drown himself in the other's stead. 
He substitutes his skilled service for another's vain 
struggles, and thus saves the lost. 

Is it the case that Christ did and suffered exactly 
what we must otherwise have done or suffered ? It is 
not so put in Scripture. He became the Son of Man 



Atonement. 201 

as well as the Son of God that He might take His 
position as our representative. He deliberately sub- 
mitted as our substitute to a certain course which 
culminated in death, and that the death of the Cross. 
He thus carried out the Divine plan, and justified 
God in dealing with us in a way from which He was 
otherwise debarred. Sin was laid on Him that it 
might not be imputed to us. The failure of the race 
was laid on Him who knew not what failure was. He 
made Himself responsible for us, and bore the con- 
sequences of sin in their most extreme form (see 
2 Cor. v. 14-21). This is the teaching of Scripture on 
Christ's substitution, and it is so set forth by such 
writers as Archbishop Magee (the elder), Dr. Dale, 
and others. 

The strong and varied expressions in the New 
Testament are so worded as to be adapted to many 
minds, but they are not all equally intelligible and 
acceptable to every one of us. Probably, as we see 
more of our own defective nature and of the hateful- 
ness of sin in God's sight, we shall more fully value 
the very strongest of them. 

Perhaps we may put the case of the Lord's sin- 
bearing thus : — 

The things which sinful men did against Christ, 
when they insulted, wounded, and crucified Him, were 
taken and borne by Him as representing all sin done 
against God. In this sense they were representative. 
The men who inflicted them were also regarded by 
Him as representing all nations. He submitted to all 
that was thus laid upon Him deliberately and willingly; 



202 The Faith of Centuries. 

He bore it in a sacrificial sense, through the eternal 
Spirit (Heb. ix. 14) ; and thus by one act, course, or 
process of obedience, He overcame, undid, destroyed, 
the evil which had come about through the devices of 
the Evil One and through the fall of our first parents. 

IX. Christ 's Atoning Work Objective and Subjective. 
— We have seen that the Lord Jesus Christ has over- 
come evil with good, and has undone the works of 
the Devil by the sacrifice of Himself upon the Cross. 
This He did in the interests of the whole world, and 
in accordance with the wise counsel of the eternal 
Father. But the question is sometimes asked whether 
the Atonement is objective or subjective. If it were 
only subjective, it could only affect those human 
beings who hear of it. But if it is also objective, 
then it must be intended to produce some effect on 
the relations between God and man generally. The 
wording of Scripture inclines us to believe that it is 
both. It is a revelation both of the hatefulness of 
sin and of the depth of the Divine love and pity. 
Sin was positively dealt with by being endured in 
its extreme form. God is now faithful and just to 
forgive sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 
It is not that man has appeased God, but that God in 
Christ has made sin forgivable. The blood-shedding 
of Christ has ratified the New Covenant or Dis- 
pensation. So far we are compelled to say that the 
Atonement is an objective fact affecting the Divine 
course, independent of the faith of those who should 
take it in. It was accomplished before any one 



Atonement. 203 

believed in it. It was objective before it could become 
subjective. 

Still it is subjective. Whilst the death of Christ 
broke down the barrier between God and man which 
sin had set up, and made it possible for God's grace 
to flow freely, it also constitutes the strongest appeal 
to man's heart and conscience. Practically it may be 
said that in forgiving the debt God imposes a new 
obligation on the forgiven one, and this obligation we 
gladly accept if we really believe in Christ. And so 
the redeeming love of God becomes the spring of a 
reconciled and consecrated life. 

The Christian having realised the sinfulness of his 
own nature, and having joyfully accepted the message 
of Divine mercy through Christ, enlists as a soldier 
under the banner of the Crucified One; fights manfully 
against sin, the world, and the Devil ; becomes a new 
man — a man of faith and hope and love ; walks by 
the power of the Holy Spirit in the footsteps of his 
Master ; and looks forward to the fulfilment of the 
grand promise of the Lord's second coming. His 
indifference, enmity, and alienation have melted away 
under the sunny influence of the Gospel. By faith 
he appropriates the grace that is in Christ, and 
feasts upon the heavenly food, whether in private 
meditation or in sacramental participation. To him 
to live is Christ. " Christ in us " springs out of 
" Christ for us." 

There is nothing to boast of in all this. It is 
simply the work of the Spirit of Christ in our hearts, 
enabling us to die to sin and live to righteousness. 



204 The Faith of Centuries. 

We recur to the original type and idea of manhood 
which was embodied in Christ, sharing His feelings, 
aims, sympathies, sufferings, and (hereafter) His 
resurrection. 

This is the working philosophy of the Atonement. 
It does work. The enemy is conquered. The lower 
is subordinated to the higher. The seeds of Gospel 
truth bring forth life and love and victory over self. 
The marks of sin are not yet obliterated, nor the 
tendency to sin eradicated ; but if we are really 
Christ's, the Spirit's conquering force has penetrated 
our being. Daily we put off the old Adam and put on 
the new. And when the great end comes, we shall 
ascribe the victory, not to our own poor efforts, but 
to the atoning blood of the Lamb. 

R. B. GlRDLESTONE. 



X. 

{Temptation, 

PERHAPS I ought to apologise in choosing, as a 
subject for a lecture, such an old and well-worn 
theme, that commonplace of sermons, more suited to 
a preacher than a lecturer — temptation. This is no 
question of the day, as we generally account such 
questions — no subject of political interest or burning 
controversy. And yet I do not feel inclined to apolo- 
gise ; I do not regret having chosen such a subject. 
I feel that in the deepest and truest sense temptation 
is a subject of this day and every day ; and that if by 
God's help I could help any of you to have a truer 
estimate of what it means, and how it should be 
understood, resisted, and brought into life, I should be 
doing a solid piece of work, and adding something 
to the great cause of God, which is being contested in 
the conflict which is ceaselessly going on between right 
and wrong. 

Now, I suppose that every one in this congregation 
has some views of his own on this subject of tempta- 
tion. It is a subject which, if in the least we mean 
what we say, every Christian man must often be 



206 The Faith of Centuries. 

thinking about ; for every time he says the Lord's 
Prayer, he says to God, " Lead us not into tempta- 
tion." Do not put me in a position in which I shall 
be tried, do not drive me by the Spirit into the 
wilderness to be tempted of the devil ; I feel my 
weakness, and I would avoid the encounter. 

And yet temptation is that rough borderland 
between right and wrong from which Satan snatches 
so many of his victims, who are simply frightened into 
his clutches, and, like lookers-on in a street brawl, suffer 
themselves to be swept away as accomplices, when 
in reality they had only been indifferent spectators. 

I shall hope, therefore, if I can, to show you that 
temptation is no unexplored land, no unmeaning 
commonplace of religious language, but that it is a 
factor of a very important kind in the formation of 
character ; and that as, in the delicate and beautiful 
process of china ornamentation such as you see carried 
to perfection in the Midland counties, the most 
delicate manipulation of form and the most exquisite 
beauty of colour are of no use without the firing, in 
which sometimes the labour of days and the product 
of exquisite skill are ruined by the severity of the 
process, from which emerges the finished beauty of 
other works of art — so temptation has a definite part 
to play, as I said, in the formation of character. 

And at this stage I should like to be allowed 
to make four statements : (i) Temptation is by no 
means unmixed evil ; (2) there is no such thing 
as irresistible temptation ; (3) temptation is never 
out of God's hands, and God Himself is bound by 



Temptation. 207 

law and binds Himself by promise ; and (4) every 
temptation as it comes brings its own way of escape. 

No, my friends, there is no fatalism in Christianity, 
no blind irresistible compulsion. Strange to say, those 
dark hosts of evil, as they scour across the plain, own 
and must obey the signal of recall, when uttered by 
the great Commander. Dash and leap and foam as 
they will in frantic violence of shattered crest, until 
the very rock quivers at the onslaught, the waves 
must own the great command, " Hitherto shalt thou 
come, but no further." The waves of the sea are 
mighty and rage horribly, but still Christianity knows 
no dualism : He that dwelleth on high is mightier. 

Temptation, therefore, is clearly not the simple 
thing which it appears to be ; it is a mystery — a 
mystery which can be explained and has been ex- 
plained, and a mystery in which greater strength 
comes from wider knowledge. We remember our 
own King Edward III., in the pages of history, look- 
ing down from the windmill on the hills round 
Abbeville, where the Black Prince, fighting below, 
seemed engulfed by the enemy, and in imminent 
danger of destruction. We hear him refusing to send 
any succour to his aid which might withdraw from 
him the honour of a well-contested victory. His 
practised eye knew the difference between danger 
and disaster, and saw in the fierce onslaught an 
occasion of glory rather than a crisis of despair. It 
no doubt makes all the difference to feel that we 
have God at our back, that any temptation, however 
overwhelming, is accurately measured and calculated 



208 The Faith of Centuries. 

by Him, the faithful God, who will not suffer us to 
be overpressed, and not only knows the way of escape, 
but also the issue of glory and victory. 

And first of all let us grasp the fact that 
temptation is part of the regular machinery of 
discipline which must go on in the world. We shall 
see presently that temptation and sin are utterly 
distinct things, which must on no account be con- 
fused — that, in the words of an old writer, " it belongs 
to angels not to feel temptation at all, it belongs 
to devils to feel temptation and to sin from very 
wickedness, it belongs to men to feel it and to conquer." 
Temptation is the occasion out of which are made 
good or bad actions. Temptation is the order into 
action, in which bravery or cowardice is developed 
out of the same material. It is the opportunity to 
be won or lost ; it is the testing which issues in 
the formation of character ; and as such it is 
impossible to avoid it. Monastic legend tells us 
of the monk who was so often driven by irritation 
into violent anger with his fellow-monks that he 
determined to flee their society and become a hermit ; 
but while thus living quite alone, with only himself 
to please, he one day dropped his pitcher which 
he was conveying from the fountain, and burst out 
into angry exclamations against himself. He could 
flee his companions, but after all he could not flee 
himself. Many a father who has known some of 
the fierce temptations which await his boy at school 
has wondered whether he could not best avoid 
them altogether by keeping him at home. Many 



Temptation. 209 

are the searchings of heart with which a careful 
parent sends his child into the wild waves of tempta- 
tion which riot through the life of this great city. 
Many a man has shrunk within himself as horrible 
temptations have come upon him, and he has 
wondered whether, after all, even his religious pro- 
fessions were not a hollow sham, when vile thoughts, 
blasphemous thoughts, thoughts almost of murder, 
and craving for dishonest gain, coursed up and down 
the chambers of his heart — when evil has knocked 
at the door, and he has had a terrible impulse to 
rise up and unbar the gate, which a careful training 
and long discipline had locked, in order to admit 
sin. The very presence of the suggestion seemed 
like an acknowledgment by an evil companion of 
a familiar house where once he was always sure of 
a welcome and a refuge for a guilty secret. The 
bold advent of evil desire seemed like a recognition 
from an outside quarter of mischief which had made 
itself visible through cloaks of hypocrisy and invited 
in evil as a guest. No, it is hard to learn ; but if 
we would have peace, we must learn that tempta- 
tion is common to man, that every one must expect 
it and be prepared for it, and that if the immaculate 
Lamb of God, who could not sin, was tempted, no 
one, however guarded, can hope to escape. We 
must lay firm hold of this, so that we be not carried 
away by the cunning of Satan. The world is a 
place of discipline, and we are disciplined by tempta- 
tion. But also, in view of one of the most perplexing 
problems of life, it is necessary that we should keep 

14 



210 The Faith of Centuries. 

our understanding clear on this subject. Walk, my 
friends, this evening down any of the streets you 
like in the East of this city, and see the children 
swarming in the road ; follow some of them up 
into the houses where they congregate, without 
decent accommodation many of them, or chance 
of refinement or moral culture, born in sin, amidst 
sinful surroundings, swaddled in vice, and nurtured 
in infamy. And we are told — and we feel that what 
we are told is right — that there should at least be 
an equality of opportunity for every man. Equality 
of opportunity ! What opportunity have they 
except for a life of vice, to which everything has 
systematically and carefully led them? Looking 
at these drinking in wickedness with their mothers' 
milk, can we say that these temptations are no more 
than they can bear, and that for them too there is 
a way of escape, and at least an opportunity equal 
to that of their more fortunate brethren, brought 
up in comfort, and sheltered, in early years at all 
events, from the knowledge of sin? 

Certainly, dear friends, it would be terrible to think 
that in the eyes of Almighty God there were human 
beings condemned by no fault of their own, but only 
for lack of opportunity. He Himself, our gracious 
Lord, has spoken that word of mercy which tells of 
publicans and harlots going into heaven, as if tne 
conditions of blessing which once actually existed at 
Capernaum would be reckoned to them in the eyes of 
Omniscience, who knew that they would have received 
the opportunity if they had it. We should not neces- 



Temptation. 211 

sarily be giving the gutter child its opportunity if we 
could have taken it from the degradation of the streets 
and put it in Belgrave Square and sent it to Eton. 
Solemn as is the responsibility resting upon us all to 
improve these conditions, and enlarge the opportu- 
nities for good in those who are so sadly deficient in 
them, still in God's sight each one of these souls has 
its opportunity, each one is tested with temptation no 
greater than he can bear. To each God is faithful, 
and to each there is a way of escape. Look at some 
waste patch in London, where the houses have been 
pulled down, and the bricks lie in heaps, and piles of 
refuse are littered about, and man does all he can to 
add to the squalor and dreariness of the scene. See 
how quickly God weaves over it all, where men will 
let Him, the kindly verdure of springing grass and 
various kinds of flowering plants. We should not 
have thought that the men in Caesar's household had 
an equality of opportunity with other men in the days 
of St. Paul ; and yet they produced their saints. An 
inspired epistle which we read continually in the 
Church has to do with a runaway slave, whom tradi- 
tion has elevated to be a bishop. From time to time 
those who know best would be able to tell us of deeds 
of heroism, self-devotion, and love coming from the 
outcasts of society — a capacity for deep feeling and 
tender sympathy, the deeper and the tenderer as 
coming from those who know the weight of a tempta- 
tion so great as almost to crush out hope, and a way 
of escape so small that it seemed hardly visible. No ; 
God does not allow His omnipotence to be curtailed 



212 The Faith of Centuries. 

by environment, nor His faithfulness to be limited by 
our want of love. There is temptation for every one ; 
it is common to man ; but it is controlled, regulated, 
nicely adjusted, and in each case the way of escape 
lies open to those who have faith to see it, and it lies 
through the temptation. 

What, then, are the sources of temptation? Do 
we sufficiently know its origin ? Can we accurately 
gauge its intensity? We should do wrong if, in 
trying to investigate a subject like this, we were to 
narrow down our idea of temptation to incitement to 
evil, coming from an evil quarter. Whatever tempta- 
tion may mean in our ordinary parlance, evil so soon 
passes under the guiding and controlling hand of 
God that, like poisons used to heal, in the phar- 
macopoeia of the skilful physician, temptation to 
evil becomes speedily a provocation to good. No ; if 
we are to understand temptation at all, we must widen 
our outlook. 

There are more sources than one of temptation, 
and the first is a source which we are apt to overlook, 
and so to lose its significance ; it is none other than 
God Almighty Himself. 

In more than one place God reveals Himself as 
tempting men. God tempted Abraham by the order 
to slay his only son. God tempted David to number 
the people by permitting Satan to suggest it to him. 
It is a common phenomenon of daily life, if we only 
knew where to look for it, in which God may be 
seen tempting men, in His goodness, to goodness, 
for their good. A temptation which may issue in 



Temptation. 2 1 3 

evil, if improperly welcomed and impatiently borne, 
is yet designed to issue in greater strength and fuller 
development, if honestly and faithfully received — like 
the charges of gunpowder which test the enduring 
power of the gun to the uttermost, but are designed 
to prove its usefulness for the rough purposes of 
warfare. Joseph and Daniel are tried respectively 
with the same temptations as those which tried David 
and St. Peter, but they emerge through degradation 
and the prison and the fear of death to a greater 
eminence than they enjoyed before. I need not 
point out to you that temptations which come from 
God are no easy things which any one can bear. All 
that is ordinarily said about temptation applies to 
them. Listen to the Apostle St. Paul crying out 
to God to remove the thorn in the flesh, the minister 
of Satan sent to buffet him : " For this thing I be- 
sought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from 
me. And He said unto me, My grace is sufficient for 
thee : for My strength is made perfect in weakness." 

See men and women around us snapping under the 
sharp discipline of God. Here one has plunged into 
some dissolute habit or some criminal carelessness, 
and his friends say, " Ah, poor man ! he has had 
great trials lately." He has failed, that is, under the 
discipline of God. Or we hear of some one who 
even casts back into the face of God that life which 
God has given him, because in his despair he has 
found the burden of life intolerable, and has not been 
able to see a purpose in life, a gleam of sunshine in 
the darkness of his cave, and he has died a miserable 



214 The Faith of Centuries. 

suicide. Here, again, is one who has failed utterly, 
who has allowed himself to be crushed under the 
weight of the heavy hand with which God has 
sought to fashion and develop his life. Yet, could 
they but have seen it, with the trial, coming out of 
it, there was the way of escape, there was the special 
grace enabling them to bear it, the special virtue to 
be developed out of it. 

It has been so all through the history of human 
experience. The sorrows of the world's sin have 
brought out the Church. The sufferings of the 
human frame have developed the healing art. Trouble 
has brought the unexpected store of sympathy. The 
depth of despair has brought closer the vision of 
God. Down in the deep pit of misery we have 
caught a view of the stars even at midday. "Woe 
unto you that have lost patience [the power of 
bearing] ! and what will ye do when the Lord shall 
visit you ? " 

But the most characteristic source of tempta- 
tion is of course the devil. I believe some affect 
to believe at the present day that there is no such 
person. Certainly I am unable to see how any 
believer in the words and actions of our blessed Lord 
can have any doubt as to his existence and power. 
And I would say further, that no one who has in 
the least struggled to obtain mastery over himself 
and reach the higher walks of Christianity can doubt 
for one moment that he has to contend with a person 
of astounding cunning and power, not an impalpable 
and impersonal principle of evil. Certainly it is one 



Temptation. 215 

of the devil's cleverest devices to persuade people 
that he does not exist, and he is never more clever 
than when he is " shamming dead." And we must 
remember at the outset that it belongs to the jugglery 
of the accusing angel, known as the devil or slanderer, 
to try and confuse in our minds attack and defeat, 
temptation and sin. It is one thing to be tempted, 
another thing to sin. Before any sin can be set up, 
three processes must be gone through. First there 
is the suggestion of evil. Eve receives the invitation 
to taste of the forbidden fruit ; Pilate is importuned 
to condemn Christ. Here per se there is no sin, 
unless this suggestion has been wilfully and de- 
liberately invited by running into temptation. Then 
there comes the delight, the acquiescence in the 
suggestion. Eve sees that the tree is good for food ; 
Pilate sees the danger of a rupture with Tiberius. 
And here sinfulness is commencing, until at last the 
will consents. Eve wills to eat ; Pilate wills to con- 
demn ; and sin is formed, according to the strong 
statement of St. James, pregnant with death. There- 
fore here once more let us welcome this blessed truth, 
that every temptation, if we do not wilfully bring it 
on ourselves, is a temptation to good as well as to 
evil. It is an occasion, an engagement with the 
enemy, out of which emerge equally the hero and the 
coward. 

Now, as time presses, let us study some of the 
regions in which Satan's temptations come upon 
us. We may be sure that we shall find them in 
the example of the temptation of our blessed Lord, 



216 The Faith of Centuries. 

which was no doubt Satan's masterpiece, the model 
on which he founds many more of his attacks. And 
note first that he attacks Him in the region of the 
appetite. Here he nearly always begins, and has 
seldom to go any further. He hangs about schools 
and nurseries and young life, and tries to enslave 
the Christian soul, while yet a child, to his service. 

The appetite — this is the point where Satan is 
riding rough-shod over the lives of hundreds and 
thousands of human beings. I have seen the agony 
of an awakened soul again and again trying to throw 
off the vile slavery of a youthful sin riveted by 
Satan. Think, dear friends, of the terrible condition 
of our streets, the coarse animalism of our villages. 
Is this what our men and women were meant to 
be? Is this lovely? Is this noble? Is this life? 
When are we going to take up the battle vigorously 
and in earnest against the slave-trade of lust which 
Satan binds upon this nation through the temptation 
of appetite ? Impurity is the open sore of the world. 

Listen to the hideous sophistry with which he 
propagates his deadly snares. "It is, after all, 
human nature," he says, with a pretended tenderness 
and cynical contempt for our weakness ; " you cannot 
avoid it. As soon as appetite wakes up it must 
be satisfied. If it were not meant to be satisfied, it 
would not have been implanted." Here, if I mistake 
not, are two very subtle and dangerous arguments, 
which I should like briefly to touch upon. 

First, as regards nature. There is no term more 
cruelly abused than this. " It is not nature blindly to 



Temptation. 217 

follow appetite. In the lower animal instinct and 
passion are the same thing. And whatever he does, he 
obeys a fated impulsion which governs him and keeps 
him in the sphere where God has placed him. It is 
not so with man ; gifted, it is true, with the instinct 
of passion, inasmuch as bound to a body and subject 
thereby to the yoke of things sensible, he raises 
himself up to God by the light of reason ; and in 
this faculty, whereby he can look out so far and 
so high, he has a point of support against the claims 
of servitude." No ; nature in man is not a blind 
following of the passions. Man is not regulated by 
instinct, like one of the lower animals. He has not 
the check which there is in instinct. Man ages ago 
elected to manage himself, to know good and evil 
from without ; and having made this choice, if he 
would be natural, a man must regulate his passion 
by reason ; if not, the result is not a natural state, 
but a complete upset of all nature, eventually ending 
in disintegration and death, as may be seen in any 
drunkard or sensualist. To follow nature for a man 
is to exercise self-control, to be guided by reason as 
a lower animal is guided by instinct. 

As to the second plea — that an appetite given was 
meant to be satisfied. This is difficult to discuss. 
It is easier to see the fallacy than to explain 
it, especially in such a subject. I would only say 
that the appetites appear to have been given to 
us as a means to an end. Directly these appetites 
are followed as ends in themselves or apart from 
their designed ends they are wrong. Every one 



218 The Faith of Centuries. 

shudders with horror at the description of the 
Roman emperors eating for eating's sake, and making 
themselves sick that they might eat again. So 
with other appetites. There is only one legitimate 
satisfaction of them, which is safeguarded by the 
law of marriage. To act in any other way is as 
degrading and horrible, even more so than the 
instance mentioned above. An appetite unsatisfied 
does not diminish from the completeness of life. 
An appetite held in check and reserved for its 
proper purpose leaves a man stronger and more 
fast in his manhood. It is an appetite dissipated 
and ruined until it overmasters the will which over- 
throws the balance and enslaves the man. No ; at 
least we will resist this accursed sophistry ; on any 
showing grace is stronger than nature, reason than 
instinct, and man is higher than a brute. 

Much need also is there that here we should 
resist the propaganda of evil which under the 
alluring name of art or literature goes on all around 
us. Let us take as our motto in this the glorious 
words of St. Paul : " Whatsoever things are true, 
whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are 
just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things 
are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report ; 
if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, 
think on these things." 

Besides the temptation through the appetite, we 
know that Satan also approaches through what we 
call the soul — i.e. the inner principle of life. He 
tampers with the policy, the aim, the motive of life, 



Temptation. 219 

by means of a view from a high mountain. Surely 
no one can resist a beautiful world like this! All 
this idea of the cross and self-denial is wrong. 
This is not such a bad world after all, if men knew 
how to manipulate it. A view ! What a deceiving 
thing it is as one looks out upon it, so mellowed 
by distance, so rounded off, so suggestive ! The 
view of a vast plain, with its towns and villages — 
how miasma and blight and bog and stunted growth 
only lend so much beauty of dancing mist or striking 
shape or brilliant colour ! The towns and villages 
merely fall into the lines of the perspective, and 
the hideous sights and sounds of woe are all 
swallowed up in the blurring chasm of distance. 
A view ! The young man entering on life stands 
at his doorstep, and sees rolling before him the 
carriages of the wealthy, and is altogether upset 
by the view of riches, and enters on his work a 
discontented man with a false aim ; or he gazes at 
the life of successful business firmly rooted and 
grounded on the earth, with its houses and its 
resources and its power over the world, and he 
too is tempted to fall down and worship Satan 
and say, " Give me this power." 

We must remember that besides appetite, known 
as the temptation of the flesh, we have to deal with 
a subtle danger known as "the world," a sort of 
influence, a mist which gathers with great rapidity 
and dense volume out of life, confusing its direction 
and perverting its objective. It is an influence 
which mounts up from humanity, gathered thick 



220 The Faith of Centuries. 

over history, passed upwards in dense volume from 
the careless lives of men, rolling in heavy vapour 
over creatures that appeal to the appetite, so thick 
that it would seem as if some only lived to eat 
and drink and be comfortable. It smooths out 
the distances in religion and obliterates the objects 
of faith. And this produces one never-altering result 
in body, soul, or spirit : softness, easiness, comfort — 
no stern, unflinching morality, no ascetic rules. 
The world-religion, the world-morality, the world- 
ideals, we know what they mean — so that no one 
can let himself go, so to speak, in the world. The 
most valuable, the most healthy surroundings, as 
they appear may suddenly develop the world- 
mist, which confuses and stupefies our very books, 
society, science, religion itself, and religious influences. 
While we get good out of the world for all sorts 
of purposes, at the same time we have to be 
always on our guard against this tarnishing mist. 
Even while we are taking in food for the machinery 
of life, the world with its feasting and luxury may 
swoop down and injure our integrity. We must 
be vigorous and watchful even here with fasting 
and abstinence, so unhealthy is the world. While 
we satisfy our sense of beauty in art or music, 
again we are conscious that we cannot let ourselves 
go. While we carry out the end of life to which 
God has called us, once more we dare not let 
ourselves go. It is a dangerous and unhealthy 
atmosphere to which Satan tempts us absolutely 
to commit ourselves ; and like the famous Italian 



Temptation, 221 

grotto, it strikes with its mephitic vapour all that 
moves close to the surface, while it spares those 
who keep themselves above it. Ah, my friends, 
never close, I beseech you, with this offer of success 
which Satan offers you ! He is asking us to add up 
the sum-total of our life, while leaving out the top 
line. He is asking us to part with our eternal 
inheritance at the price of the gratification of a few 
years. He is asking us to sell our birthright for 
a mess of pottage. 

There is but little time in which to consider 
Satan's third method of attack, through the region of 
the spirit, on the pinnacle of the Temple. Of the many 
forms of spiritual temptation, I will only pause to 
instance one : " If Thou be the Son of God, cast 
Thyself down." It is a very subtle temptation to 
dictate to God how He ought to treat us. Stairs 
and walking down are much too simple things for 
God to care for. The Son of God has a right to 
expect upholding angels and visible intervention ; 
nothing between him and God. It sounds well, but it is 
really the very highest presumption. It is the claim 
for exceptional treatment, which is the very essence 
of satisfied self-complacency. It has been said, " Men 
have a greater quarrel with God's condescension than 
with all His other attributes. Men would be Christians 
without the Sacraments, Christians without a Church, 
Christians without the Incarnation, Christians without 
a Revelation." Perhaps this self-complacent pre- 
sumption has reached its climax in what is trium- 
phantly preached as undenominational religion, in 



222 The Faith of Centuries. 

which, in face of the most precise and definite command, 
" Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, 
baptising them into the name of the Father and of 
the Son and of the Holy Ghost : teaching them to 
observe all things whatsoever I have commanded 
you," we have decided that first this ingredient and 
then that is indifferent, and wonder at the impotency 
of a watery residuum to check the growth of juvenile 
immorality. 

Temptation to good comes from God. Tempta- 
tion to evil comes from Satan. There still remains 
another source still — there is a temptation which 
comes from within. There are at least two con- 
ditions we know for the spread of disease — an infected 
air, and an enfeebled constitution. And so in the 
sin-infected air around us our weak nature is a dis- 
tinct trial to us. True that at Baptism original sin 
was washed away, true that God has given us a new 
nature, but still there remains the weakness — " poor 
human nature " we call it ; and when this fails 
beneath the assault, where is the means of escape? 
Its very refinement exposes us to danger. The in- 
tellectual faculties which sweep the past and drink 
in the present and draw down the future ; imagination, 
memory, thought, all exquisitely sensitive, all liable 
to warp and pollution ; the soul with its invincible 
ambition, the body with its untamable appetites — 
poor human nature ! When the storm falls upon it, 
how can it bear up ? When the assault comes, how 
can it endure ? When the tide of passion rises, how 
can it escape being overwhelmed ? Where is the 



Temptation. 223 

escape? It is no hideous passion in Abraham, but 
his tenderest love of his only son, the vision of a 
desolate home and a broken heart. How can he obey 
God, and rise up and slay his son ? Daniel, after all, 
is but human ; his whole life had been a struggle 
against overwhelming odds. How can he submit to 
degradation and loss and a cruel death ? God asks 
too much ; it is more than human nature can bear ! 
Is David deserted of God? Does no sweet impulse 
sweep across his soul ? Does no memory of past 
victory, no sweet refrain of inspired psalm, no linger- 
ing cadence of beauty, no vision of holy love, intervene 
between him and the tide of passion? Has God 
forgotten to be gracious ? Is there even a time when 
all good seems to drain out of the soul, and leave it 
bare and lifeless at the mercy of hideous temptations, 
which trickle into every channel forsaken by the stream 
of grace, until the waters come in even unto the soul ? 
Poor human nature ! — never too much temptation 
— God always faithful ! A way of escape through 
the temptation ! Where ? Surely here the way of 
escape is in drawing on the reserve of strength stored 
in the soul. Do we not know how a doctor will say, 
when shock after shock of insidious complications of 
disease have shaken the sick man's strength to the 
very foundations, " His splendid constitution saved 
him " ? Does not St. Paul tell his much-loved Timothy, 
" Stir up the gift of God which is in thee by the 
putting on of my hands " ? Is there not, or should 
there not be, a reserve of strength within the souls 
of us all ? Holy Baptism is not a picturesque rite, 



224 The Faith of Centuries. 

performed when we were unconscious and unconsent- 
ing infants, which has no relation to our stronger and 
maturer life ; there still exists in all of us who have not 
quenched it or driven it out a reserve of baptismal grace, 
an ultimate propensity to good, and a capability of it 
which years of wilful sin have not been able to eradi- 
cate. Confirmation was no mere taking upon our- 
selves of our baptismal vows, as is sometimes said with 
strange ignorance of its real meaning ; every Christian 
is responsible for his moral action as soon as he knows 
right from wrong, and every child who says his cate- 
chism takes his promises on himself then and there. 
No ; Confirmation was an access of strength coming 
to us through the Holy Spirit. And it stays there 
still, welcomed into our souls with all the ardour of 
youthful enthusiasm, a store of strength, a spiritual 
reserve in time of need. It is not in vain that we 
have so often approached the Altar, so often prayed, 
so often received Absolution, so often heard the Word 
of God. Look at the perfect man, our Lord Jesus 
Christ, undergoing the same fierce temptations that 
assail us, and see Him as it were simply drawing 
on the supply of His perfect boyhood. With all the 
strength of the Godhead at His disposal, He laid 
Satan low with a few texts out of Holy Scripture, 
such as any Jew might have learnt in his boyhood, 
or worn in his phylacteries, or bound as a frontlet 
between his eyes. 

In our spiritual gifts we shall always find a reserve 
of strength, so that even the memory of past grace is 
a way of escape. 



Temptation. 225 

Some may wearily ask with St. Paul that the trial 
may be taken clean away. God will not promise 
us this. He promises us powers of endurance and 
ways of escape. The discipline of character is no 
easy thing, so that God can effect it without giving us 
pain. Our salvation, it may be, depends on the sharp 
sting of temptation. God has a grace of character, 
a charm of spiritual beauty, which can only be carved 
and cut out of us by the sharp chisel of suffering 
which He knows how to inflict. The father of the 
faithful, the preserver of the life of his brethren, the 
prophet who sees visions of God, the apostle who 
aspires to drink His cup and receive His baptism — 
these are no creations of nature, but of grace. They 
are made, not born. And grace means discipline, and 
discipline means suffering. Satan, with his cruel and 
relentless persecution, is in God's hands the means of 
forming a character which, without this assault, would 
have failed in its perfection and have lacked the com- 
pletion of its discipline. Human nature, so delicate 
and so tender — we would not part with one of its 
exquisite susceptibilities — we would not crush it in 
Stoic contempt, nor mutilate its tenderness, nor suffer 
it to run riot, in utter indifference to its power to 
hinder or to help. There somewhere in heaven sits 
at the right hand of God, dignified for ever by the 
Incarnation, "poor human nature/' superior to all 
temptation, insensible to all suffering, elevated by 
union with the Godhead, speaking to us of the 
privilege which awaits those who can offer their 
bodies living sacrifices to God, and can glorify God 

IS 



226 The Faith of Centuries. 

in their bodies as well as in their spirits, which are 
God's. 

We cannot despise temptation, but we will not be 
crushed down by it : never too much — never in itself 
wholly bad — always with its own way of escape. 
And, dear friends, let us remember this — that as Jesus 
Christ met temptation with the full force of His God- 
head, without any guilty connivance or any treacherous 
desire or secret consent, as an external discipline and 
an affront from an enemy outside Himself, so the more 
we become like Jesus Christ, if we may never despise 
temptation, at least we shall not be cast down by it ; 
to us, too, it will be external, the hard material of 
stern discipline, which we receive with submission 
and resist with confidence. 

W. C. E. Newbolt. 



XL 

Zhe H>uni0bment of Sim 

THERE is an hiatus, doubtless, between this 
lecture and the one which immediately pre- 
cedes it. Inasmuch as temptation and sin are two 
distinct things, it would have been more methodical 
to have treated definitely and scientifically the 
subject of sin in itself before going on to treat of 
its punishment. And yet, in the limited time which 
we have at our disposal, it will perhaps be found 
that after all sin is best described in its effects ; and 
that, as in the case of some instrument of destruction, 
a gun or an explosive compound, the ordinary man 
will have a better idea of its power by contemplating 
the shattered target and long range than he would 
gain by a mere discussion of its mechanism or 
analysis of its composition ; so after all, in con- 
sidering the effect of sin, which invariably follows it 
in the way of punishment, we shall in reality gain 
as true, perhaps a truer, insight into its nature than 
if we had deliberately discussed its origin, its rationale, 
and its nature. 

Are we in the least aware of, does the ordinary 

227 



228 The Faith of Centuries. 

man of the world in the smallest degree realise, the 
tremendous woe and suffering which is directly 
attributable to sin ? The shadow of crime is darkly- 
marked on every civilised community. A prison is 
the most ordinary outward sign of its existence. 
Social faults, faults against society, faults which dis- 
figure society, from the uneven or improper division 
of the means of life, are obvious and sinister. But 
how many of us stop to trace up the presence of sin, 
what it is, and what it means, in suffering, horror, and 
despair, in punishment in the present, in punishment 
still more dreadful threatened in the future ? Listen 
to the great roar of London, as it rolls up from the 
docks and the shipping in the East, and hangs over 
the crowded alleys, and sways and swells round 
the church steeples, and rattles across from the cease- 
less clatter and hum of the streets, here and there 
a cry dashed up into the air like spray, but under- 
neath one mighty inarticulate roar, as the human 
machine goes about its work, its worship, its pleasure, 
and its profit. Ah, dear friends ! if we could analyse 
in some way that mighty voice, we should hear a 
shrill, sharp wail of agony. Yes, hear it in the 
boisterous laugh from the painted lips ; hear it in 
the thick utterance of the swinish drunkard ; hear 
it in the wearied tramp of the prisoner tied to the 
treadmill of pleasure ; hear it in the groan of the 
poor patient in the hospital, the suffering of the little 
child apparently only born to suffer, in the agonised 
terror at the approach of death. Sin reigns, armed 
with a cruel lash, here in London, there in the country, 



The Punishment of Sin. 229 

where all looks so peaceful and innocent Trace 
pain, disappointment, anxiety, up far enough, and there 
sits sin — the terror, the puzzle, the perplexity, the 
despair of the world. 

And if these are the ordinary phenomena which 
greet any one who is alive to things as they are, 
this common experience is strangely corroborated 
by that which professes to be the Word of God. Sin 
is the pivot on which the whole Bible history turns. 
The Fall and its consequence, the Atonement, are 
there represented as the key to the right under- 
standing of all history and all experience. If we 
look at the statements of Holy Scripture in detail, 
this fact stands out with equal clearness. Over the 
Old Testament might be written this text : " Our 
God is a consuming fire." Punishment, catastrophe, 
doom, speedy and awful, break out in deluge, plague, 
exterminating war, and dread expiation. The whole 
system of Mosaic sacrifice is eloquent of the ex- 
haustion of wrath against sin ; while at the same time 
the impotence of man by himself to shake off guilt 
is emphasised by the fact, that under the Jewish 
Law no sacrifice availed for the pardon of wilful sin. 
All this complicated system was simply available 
for what we call venial sins, or sins of infirmity. 
If we come on to the New Testament, the utterances 
of our Lord Himself are no less terrible. He speaks 
of a punishment on sin which is " everlasting " ; of 
soul and body being destroyed in hell ; of outer 
darkness, with weeping and gnashing of teeth ; of 
the possibility of a man losing his own soul ; of 



230 The Faith of Centuries. 

an undying worm and an undying fire ; of Judas 
the Apostle being in such a desperate state that it 
were good for him never to have been born ; of a 
resurrection of damnation as well as a resurrection 
of life ; of an eternal sin ; of a sin for which no 
forgiveness is possible. The impression our blessed 
Lord strove to leave, however much we may dispute 
about the meaning of words, was surely this— -that 
sin was of such a deadly nature, that if persisted in 
and not forgiven, it would be punished for ever in 
a future state with punishments only inadequately 
to be described in human language. 

Is this an over-statement? Is sin a theological 
nightmare. Was the Fall, if there were a fall, after 
all a fall upwards ? Putting aside the quotations 
from Bible histories and of Bible words, do the 
ordinary facts around us bear witness to anything 
else than misfortune, imprudence, the ordinary effects 
of progress ? Is not the world like a great glacier 
in the higher Alps, which, as it pushes its way, leaves 
on either side of it a moraine of unfortunates and 
failures ? Dear friends, I feel confident that an 
impartial view of the facts forces us to say " No." 
If the Bible had never reached our hands, an im- 
partial investigator of life would have arrived at 
the same conclusion, as indeed moralists have done 
again and again — that there is something wrong 
with man, that he cannot be left to himself, that the 
world is full of trouble, and that punishment follows 
on misdoing. 

To narrow this down, I am going to ask you to 



The Punishment of Sin. 231 

consider the punishment which follows sin under 
certain wide divisions or aspects, that we may the 
better see how important it is for ourselves and the 
community at large that we should labour for its 
suppression or its control. 

I. I would ask you, therefore, to consider, first, the 
loss which is brought about in the world by sin. 
Professor Ruskin says somewhere, " I do not so much 
wonder at what people suffer ; I often wonder at what 
they lose." Is there any one of us, dear friends, here 
to-night who is quite what he might have been ? 
Somewhere in the archives of heaven there is the 
plan of what we were meant to be. Is it anything 
resembling what we are ? What is the history of that 
bodily defect, that mental obliquity, that spiritual 
dulness ? Perhaps some tendency we deplore, some 
weakness which warps our character, may be traced 
back far into the regions of heredity ; and were it 
not for Holy Baptism, which deals with this, would 
paralyse our efforts. Look at that young man. A 
few years ago we remember him strong and vigorous 
and healthy ; it was a pleasure to see him so strong 
in his vitality, so full of healthy life and enjoyment. 
And look at him now — the white face, the shrunken 
limbs, the shaking hands, the listless eye. His fond 
relations say it is the air of London or too close 
attention to business which has stamped him with 
the marks of premature age, and has robbed the 
bloom from his cheeks and the strength from his 
limbs. It is nothing of the kind. It is sin — sin 
which has promised him pleasure, and he has only 



232 The Faith of Centuries. 

found bitterness and decay. Look at another ! At 
the moment all Europe is in suspense at the develop- 
ment of some political complication. The fate of 
nations is hanging in the scale. Armenians are 
trembling on the brink of a blood-stained grave. See, 
he has bought a newspaper ; he is scanning it with 
eager gaze. He cannot wait to get home ; he is 
reading it in the streets. What for? What is he 
looking at ? What is he devouring ? He is anxiously 
endeavouring to ascertain who was the winner in 
some trumpery race ; to see whether he has won a 
few shillings from a friend who he knows can ill 
afford to lose them, or whether he has lost an amount 
which he has no means of paying, and which may 
perhaps entail the perpetration of a dishonourable 
action, in order that he may pay what is ironically 
called a debt of honour. I ask you, is there no 
loss here? Is there not a sad and tragical loss? 
Is this all the interest that he has got in life ? 
Is this the food for a mind which was made to 
know God and the true and the beautiful and the 
good ? Is it nothing to a man that he has so lost 
his sense of beauty that he can put up with a vulgar 
picture or a tasteless song ? Is it nothing to a man 
that he has so lost his eager hold on life that he can 
idle away his time in doing nothing, and waste money 
on his appetites and energy in working out his own 
ruin ? The old poets have told us of Hercules laying 
aside his lion's skin and club while he plies the distaff 
of the queen to whom he was so foolishly attached, 
while she strikes him with her sandals and chides him 



The Punishment of Sin. 233 

for his uncouth spinning. There is many a hero of 
God who has thus lost his manhood and disgraced 
his own honour as he has bowed to the slavery of sin. 
The losses of sin ! It is a terrible subject, which 
goes far deeper than we have gone at present. You 
see a blind man gazing with vacant stare at the 
glorious beauty of the landscape, and you say, " Poor 
man ! What he has lost ! " You see one impassive 
and unmoved at the sound of splendid music, where 
the notes ebb and flow in waves of melody about his 
ears — one who can hear no voice of birds, no voice of 
man, in the mystery of deafness ; and again you say, 
" Poor man ! What he has lost ! " But there is a 
loss of which these are but faint shadows : the loss 
of God out of life, which begins, it may be, with a 
deprivation, and is a disquieting pang, which, if it is 
not arrested, becomes death — which, if persisted in, 
becomes utter and complete separation from God. 
There are some sins which more than others have this 
awful power of eating out the faculties of the soul, 
until the power of receiving good is gone — the power 
of loving good things — when sin can settle down 
without arousing a sense of shame, and beauty appeals 
to a blurred vision, and love to a dead heart, and 
honour to a soul which can longer even appreciate it. 
My friends, if, seeing what you do, you have ever 
pitied the blind — if, hearing what you do, you have 
ever pitied the deaf — pity the sinner more for his 
empty life, for that blank where we see glory, for that 
dull void where we hear glorious strains. Oh yes, let 
us pity ourselves : for who has not suffered loss ? Listen 



234 The Faith of Centuries. 

to the great dramatist as he opens out the wail of lost 
innocence — the wail which is going up from thousands 
this very night : — 

Where can I go ? where can I go ? 
Everywhere woe 1 woe ! woe ! 

Into my chamber brightly 

Came the early sun's good-morrow ; 

On my restless bed unsightly 
I sate up in my sorrow. 

Never was grief like Thine : 

Look down, look down on mine ! 

II. The punishment of loss which accompanies 
sin is obvious whenever we pause to think. Let 
us now consider another punishment which plays 
a large part in all systems of morality, and is 
directly dealt with by Christianity. I mean the 
enfeebling of the will under the tyranny of evil habit, 
which amounts to a cruel captivity. It is one of the 
most pathetic things in the world to study the really 
beautiful systems of ancient morality, in which the 
moral goodness they sought to attain was of necessity 
placed on a pedestal as an inaccessible prize of un- 
attainable beauty. The problem which defied, and 
must of necessity defy, all merely human systems 
was this : What was to be done to strengthen the 
will ? " Video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor" (" I 
see the better and approve, I follow the worse "). We 
should make a great mistake if we believed all sinners 
to be wilful sinners, and to sin from sheer malignity. 
There are hundreds and thousands who are victims 
to their sin who are yet dying to be free from its 



The Punishment of Sin. 235 

loathsome captivity,— hundreds of drunkards who 
would be temperate to-morrow if they could ; hundreds 
now victims to their lusts who would be pure to- 
morrow if they could ; hundreds who would give up 
betting and gambling and swearing if they could. 
There is a terrible force within called habit, which 
meets the captive struggling to be free as he starts 
forth with good resolution, determined to turn over a 
new leaf and be his own master. Habit meets him 
and bars the way. Habit says to him, " So you have 
determined to alter your ways, but you have not 
asked my consent, and I forbid it. For years you have 
followed my guidance and obeyed my call. When 
you were a child, and experience first spoke to you, 
it was yours to accept or refuse. You accepted, and 
again you accepted. I am habit ; you have grown 
under my power ; you are shaped by my direction : 
I refuse to let you go." Habit is a strong power 
which has to be reckoned with, and the chains of 
habit are a cruel bondage. Habit is one of the 
strongest moral forces in the world. Look at that 
slender twig, so supple and so slight, shooting up 
erect into the air ; let it be bent ever so little, 
day by day, in one direction, and gradually it will 
assume the permanent twist which is the angle of its 
growth. Look at the trees with their crested heads 
violently turned back, when the winds off the sea 
have permanently bent them in one direction. Habit 
is a force which every sinner has to reckon with, and 
which he does not always find it easy to dismiss. It 
is an awful thing when a man feels he cannot stop ; 



236 The Faith of Centuries. 

there is no feeling so helpless as that of being run 
away with. The will utters a feeble voice, and the 
passions only mock. Habit winds its coils tighter 
and tighter round him like a python, and he feels his 
life contracting in its cruel folds. It was only one or 
two acts of dishonesty, but he must go on ; it was 
only once or twice that he stayed away from church, 
but he must go on ; it was only one or two acts of 
intemperance, but he must go on. There he goes, 
swimming with the tide ; the hard struggle against 
the stream has given way to delicious motion, un- 
retarded by opposition. But already the roar of the 
cataract is in his ears ; the smooth, cruel current 
hurls him on. He will turn and get back. Alas ! he 
cannot. He is in the grip of habit ; he is swept on 
in the agony of an impotent struggle. Unless God 
intervenes, he perishes with his freedom maimed. 
He goes into the other world as one who has tried 
and failed to save himself. 

Is God, then, not omnipotent ? Is there a power 
which can defy Him — which, when He has called, 
can interpose a barrier ? No. God is omnipotent, 
but man is not. It is here that Christianity asserts 
its pre-eminent power. All the efforts of what is 
known as grace are directed to strengthen the will 
in man. Man is not to be saved from himself, in 
spite of himself, but by God, with his own consent 
and co-operation. And it is here that so many 
make a fatal mistake in dealing with sin. They 
think the escape from it to be a matter of resolution. 
Perhaps a little recreation in the midst of too hard 



The Punishment of Sin. 237 

conditions, purer air, better surroundings, fresh 
scenes, a resolution, a pledge — all these may be 
excellent things in their way, but not enough. Habit 
still binds as a fetter when the air is purer and 
the surroundings cleaner. Habit has an evil knack 
of tearing up the most carefully written pledge. It 
is habit that must be dealt with. It is not merely 
a matter of turning over a new leaf and beginning 
again. There must be the definite repentance for 
the past, the reckoning with God. Habit is, then, 
largely dependent on supernatural help, riveted by 
the devil, and kept in its place by carefully adjusted 
temptation. And habit must be eradicated by grace. 
God must be invited in — Christ, the deliverer. 

And so the great preliminary to the release from 
habit must be a readjustment of the soul's relations 
with Christ. All those years of bondage cannot be 
as if they had never been. All the wilful acquiescence 
in sin has not left the soul so untouched by its 
influence that it can be thrown off by an impulse 
and banished by a wish. There must be the definite 
unwinding of the past by a true and earnest re- 
pentance, which, carefully and deliberately, at what- 
ever pain, untwists each link of the ponderous chain, 
with a sorrow which mourns the indignity of the 
wasted life, with a particular and careful confession 
of each wrong act, and with a definite purpose of 
amendment. Then the voice of Christ can speak with 
authority, which can cast away the fetters of habit 
and start the sinner free. " Neither do I condemn thee : 
go, and sin no more." If once we can hear that 



238 The Faith of Centuries. 

message of forgiveness, the captive is free, and the 
journey back to righteousness and peace, however 
long and however difficult, has at least the assurance 
of success. Henceforth, should he trip and fall, it 
is but a single sin, which may be remedied and 
repaired. The chain of habit, woven out of its 
long series of wilful acts, is broken by the grace and 
power of God. 

This is a freedom which every one should aim at. 
It is a perilous thing when the will gives its order 
and is not obeyed. It may be in little things, but 
obedience in little things is the test of discipline, 
and prepares the way for victory at a great crisis. 
If we will to do anything great or small within 
our own lives, our will must be obeyed. We cannot 
keep the will as a magistrate to read the Riot Act 
when things have proceeded to extremities. It is 
a perilous thing if there should be any one part 
of our composite being which is a kind of Alsatia, 
where the king's writ has no chance of being 
executed. Our composite life is too precious a thing 
that we should allow, as it were, some stray squatter 
to enclose large parts over which we have no control, 
and which minister nothing to the efficiency and 
well-being of our life. If we allow any habit to 
get out of control and out of reach of the orders 
of the imperial will, we are setting up a source of 
weakness which will do us an evil turn. The fairy 
story of the princess who was kept in prison by 
an interminable series of cobwebs which exhausted 
her patience to break through is but a parable of 



The Punishment of Sin. 239 

the soul which has allowed itself to be confined by 
the tyranny of habits which it has proved too weak 
to break down. There are some habits which the 
religion of Jesus Christ alone has the power to 
overcome ; there are some tyrannies which His grace 
alone can dissolve. And if we ask those who have 
given themselves up to His grace and love, they 
will tell us that the promised emancipation has all 
come true. The angel faces which cheered the 
dawn of innocence are coming back again. The 
wages of sin are no longer being paid ; the chains 
of habit are being broken away. Christ the consoler 
is also Christ the deliverer. The snare is broken, 
and we are delivered. 

III. A third punishment which awaits sin is sharp 
and keen sorrow, which is its inevitable accompani- 
ment. Perhaps this is one of the things that we are 
most slow to grasp — that sin, all sin, I had almost said 
every mistake, is in the eternal law of God's working 
linked with its own punishment, which certainly 
follows. We Christians have brought ourselves to 
believe that a little sin adds a certain picturesqueness 
to life, like the decay and the crumbling stones of a 
mouldering ruin ; that a little acquaintance with the 
world and its wickedness adds as it were an adultera- 
tion which makes our character more suited to the 
atmosphere in which we have to live ; that God is 
so merciful that it will almost add a zest to our joy 
in forgiveness if we bring some real sins underneath 
the power of His forgiveness. Yes, but every sin is 
punished, even in the forgiven sinner. Every sin 



240 The Faith of Centuries. 

leaves its mark and very often its weakness on life. 
A man is never just the same as if he had never 
sinned. I would give two instances — one out of Holy 
Scripture, and one out of ordinary experience. Look 
at David, what a breakdown it was — he the man after 
God's own heart, he whose heart had been swept by 
the breath of the Holy Spirit and sensitive to every 
ripple of the Divine breath. How the critic sneers 
at him ! How the sceptic mocks at him ! Adultery, 
murder, treachery, deceit ! There could hardly be a 
worse breakdown. And yet how easily God seems 
to forgive ! " The Lord also hath put away thy sin," 
said Nathan. Compare it with the long penances of 
later times, it seems almost inadequate. Yes, but 
my point is, that David, although forgiven, was never 
the same man afterwards. His punishment lasted 
to the end of his life. " The sword shall never depart 
from thy house " was literally true. Death, rebellion, 
family trouble, political disorder. Trace the punish- 
ment, if you will, only in one direction — in the 
growing insolence of Joab, the captain of his host. 
The contemptuous disregard of all David's wishes 
was an outward, visible sign of a shattered dignity 
which had vanished with his successful sin. The 
other example is from ordinary life. The most 
common and the most obviously disgusting form of 
sin, here in England at all events, is drunkenness. 
There is no sin which apparently makes a man so 
swinish and degraded, no sin which is the father of 
so many other even worse sins, than drunkenness. 
Now let us suppose a case of a drunkard who 



The Punishment of Sin. 241 

in spite of warning, has followed this vice up to the 
age of forty. Something he has read, or the grace of 
God within, appeals to him. He is converted ; he is 
pardoned ; God puts away his sin ; he never becomes 
intoxicated again. But does he recover his lost health? 
Are there not seeds of disease, sometimes more and 
sometimes less, which are the direct results of his sin, 
which God does not remove ? In his case also it is 
true the sword never departs from his house. And I 
have taken only one out of the sheaf of arrows of 
suffering with which God smites the sinner. If you 
have ever witnessed it, dear friends, you will not forget 
it — the agony of shame which sometimes accompanies 
true repentance. If ever you have seen it, you will 
never forget it — the agony of hopeless remorse, when 
the sense of sin, of evil done, of evil the consequences 
of which have slipped out of control, haunts and 
scourges the soul into an agony of despairing pain. 
It has been spoken of in this way, " The human sense 
of guilt, that awful guardian of our personal identity "; 
or again, " What would not humanity, age after age, 
have given to be free from remorse ? Yet remorse 
still stares us in the face, overshadowing our hearts 
with sadness, and driving its countless victims into 
madness, suicide, despair, and awful forebodings of 
the after-world. Men would have exorcised it if they 
could ; but they cannot. And remorse is only a darker 
name for man's conviction of his own freewill." When- 
ever a man wills to sin, whether he is pardoned or 
not, he sets in motion a cause which must end in 
some sort of punishment. The sufferings which sin 

16 



242 The Faith of Centuries. 

inflicts on the sensitive conscience of the servant of 
God may well make us pause. Punishment goes 
hand in hand with sin all down the course of life. It 
is a game of chance, from which no one ever yet has 
been known to rise up the winner. 

IV. And I cannot stop here. God who knows 
the education which we need has never hesitated 
to incite us on the one hand by the presence of 
the joys of heaven, on the other hand to frighten 
us from evil by the terrors of a future hell. I 
know that people are rebelling against this now, 
and claim to be treated as they claim to treat 
their children — without compulsion. But I cannot 
read, even if it be true that crime so called is 
diminishing, that virtue and morality are on the 
increase. I am afraid that just the contrary is 
nearer to the truth. Sins are being perpetrated 
now under an advanced and a refined civilisation of 
which a pagan would be ashamed. I very much 
doubt whether mankind can be educated without 
rewards and punishments as an inducement and a 
corrective. You cannot educate children without 
it : the rod expelled from school is brought back 
in the prison. And we, after all, are children, and 
God knows best how to treat us. And He has 
never for one moment shrunk from reveaHng the 
sinners hell. But is this compatible with God's 
love? What right has God to create a being who 
He knows will meet with such a dreadful fate? I 
would answer in some forcible words uttered by 
a great French preacher, which are well worthy 



The Punishment of Sin. 243 

of our attention : " To say that God has no right 
to create a being who might misuse His gifts is 
to say that the wicked are able to destroy God by 
hindering the exercise of one of His essential attri- 
butes. . . . God has not created isolated individuals, 
or even worlds : He has created one unique world, in 
which all beings are linked together by relations of 
mutual dependence and service ; and not one of these 
can be withdrawn without entailing the suffering of all 
the others. In the human race especially each man 
contains a posterity in himself whose term is not 
assignable, and which makes of its generation one 
united assemblage in which no single member can 
lose his place without drawing after him the multi- 
tude of his descendants. To suppress a single 
man is to suppress a race ; to suppress a wicked 
man is to suppress a people of just men who may 
spring from him. For good and evil are entwined 
together in the changeable course of mankind : a 
virtuous son succeeds to a bad father, and the 
ancestor, too, often contemplates in his distant 
progeny crimes which were to him unknown. Now 
the glance of God perceiving at once all the suc- 
cession of life, all the regeneration of good in 
evil and of evil in good, no destiny appeared solitary 
to Him ; so that in cutting it off from the anticipated 
book of life He would but cut off a course unworthy 
to be continued. In His sight Adam, a sinner, 
included the whole posterity of the saints. To 
refuse being to him because of his crime, even had 
that crime never obtained pardon, would have been 



244 The Faith of Centuries. 

to destroy in him all the merits of the human 
race. ... I know God ; I love Him ; I hope in Him ; 
I bless Him in life and death. Why should the 
fault of one of my ancestors, eternally foreseen by 
Divine goodness, have intercepted my birth ? . . . 
Why should I have been condemned to nothingness 
because one of my forefathers abused his existence ? 
. . . God had not to choose between creating or 
not creating a wicked man, but between creating or 
not creating generations of good and evil together." 
We may well leave it to Almighty God to defend 
His own honour ; and in reality we are no more 
capable of arraigning the love and tenderness of 
God than a child the compassion of a surgeon 
whom he only knows as one who puts him to 
cruel pain. 

But people, I know, cry out against eternity of 
punishment as in itself repugnant and terrible. We 
have the Universalists, who tell us that all will be 
saved at the last ; the believers in conditional immor- 
tality, who tell us that immortality is conditional 
only on goodness, and that the wicked will be de- 
stroyed as unworthy of life, not eternally punished ; 
while others maintain that sin will be ultimately 
eradicated, and that punishment will of necessity go 
with it. But, for all that, the penalty of past sin will 
linger on in the form of an eternal punishment, just 
as a man may survive an accident, and yet be doomed 
to pass a so far maimed existence. However this 
may be, the language used by Christ was evidently 
language which was meant to convey a sense of the 



The Punishment of Sin. 245 

terrible punishment which awaits sin in the other 
world. If He could say of Judas, " Good were it for 
that man if he had never been born, ,, we feel that no 
light and passing punishment could ever have drawn 
forth those strong words. 

But as it is, if we look at the problem of sin and its 
punishment as it meets us in this world, if all that 
we have been saying to-night is in the least true, the 
punishment of sin here — here in this world — needs 
explanation, just as much as the punishment of sin 
which we are led to expect in the next. We have 
seen that the punishment of sin in this world is ever- 
lasting in the sense that it goes on to the very end of 
the chapter. A repented sin is sometimes punished to 
the end of life. It is not so inconceivable, therefore, 
that the punishment of an unrepented sin may last 
for ever. Again, if we shrink from the severity of 
punishment, as we conceive it, in the next world, can 
we say that the punishment inflicted on sin here is 
mild or even commensurate with the offence as we 
ordinarily regard human offences ? We see sin and its 
punishment lingering on to generations of innocent 
children. We see an overmastering temptation, a 
trifling deflection, a mistake even, most terribly 
punished. We note the exquisite torture which 
awaits sins of the flesh, sins of intemperance — the 
torture of mind and body — and we feel that, if we are 
to begin to apologise for God, we must begin here — 
here in this world. 

Depend upon it, we shall act wisely if we leave such 
defence alone, and turn ourselves rather to the 



246 The Faith of Centuries. 

thought that, whatever Christ meant to convey, He 
certainly meant to convey this — that the punishment 
of sin is certain, lasting, and terrible. Let us anxiously 
ask ourselves whether we are preparing for ourselves 
that terrible loss which, as St. Paul tells us, may even 
overtake the saved, if they build a flimsy superstruc- 
ture on the one foundation, Jesus Christ, as they 
see all that is not holy, all that is not true, destroyed, 
and they themselves saved, yet so as by fire. Let 
us take our stand on Calvary, and there weigh 
the exceeding malice of sin by the extremity of 
pain endured by our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ 
as He hangs upon the tree ; and let us pour out our 
hearts before Him in the words of the great missionary 
who, if any one, loved God for His own sake, and was 
able to follow the guidance of His eye without being 
held in by bit and bridle of fear and threat : — 

My God, I love Thee, — not because 

I hope for heaven thereby, 
Nor yet because who love Thee not 

Are lost eternally. 

Thou, O my Jesus, Thou didst me 

Upon the cross embrace ; 
For me didst bear the nails and spear, 

And manifold disgrace, 

And griefs and torments numberless, 

And sweat of agony ; 
Yea, death itself, — and all for one 

Who was Thine enemy. 

Then why, O blessed Jesu Christ, 

Should I not love Thee well ? 
Not for the sake of winning heaven, 

Nor of escaping hell ; 



The Punishment of Sin. 247 

Not from the hope of gaining aught, 

Not seeking a reward ; 
But as Thyself hast loved me, 

O ever-loving Lord. 

So would I love Thee, dearest Lord, 

And in Thy praise will sing, 
Solely because Thou art my God, 

And my most loving King. 

W. C. E. Newbolt. 



XII. 

£be preparation in Ibistor^ for Cbriet 

IT is, my friends, the word of the Apostle, that 
when " the fulness of the time had come, God 
sent forth His Son." It follows that there was a 
certain fitness about the time of His coming ; and 
if we can more clearly discern that fitness, it will be 
one part of His manifold witness to Himself. But 
further, it is implied that His coming was the end 
of a course which led up to Him — a course which 
we may call the preparation for Him ; and in this 
sense I think I may rightly say that the teaching 
about Christ was evolutionary before evolution. He 
comes into the world as we have learned to see all 
living things come into the world, with a process of 
development behind them. But while in this, if we 
concede it as true, there is a witness borne to Him, 
yet at the same time it may suggest a new diffi- 
culty to our minds ; and that difficulty is just this : 
if He came at the end of a process, so does the 
fruit upon the tree, and so too springs the butterfly 
from the chrysalis. In a word, the preparation, men 

may think, may have evolved Christ. If so, our task 

248 



The Preparation in History for Christ. 249 

this evening is to see whether, in the first place, we 
can, so far as it is allowed to man to trace the ways 
of God in history, find a marked, real, unmistakable 
preparation for Christ up to the moment when He 
came ; and then whether, in the second place, these 
historical processes which led up to His appearance 
look as if they could have produced Him. 

I. Now, if we ask for the preparation for Christ, 
we shall of course begin with the fact that Christi- 
anity is, as St. Paul said, " of the Jews" — came from 
the Jews. But though it sprang there, it spread at 
once through a world which was especially Roman in 
character ; and had that world not also in some way 
been prepared, any perfectness of Jewish preparation 
would not have availed. And thus, you see, we have 
two quarters in which to test our question : Was there 
a preparation in Israel ? Was there a preparation in 
the world at large ? 

Parenthetically let me say that if we find this to 
have been so in that Western world of which we 
are heirs, then I think modern history and the world 
to-day show us that we have done enough. For we 
can see, even more than those who went before us, 
how much that complex of lands which surround the 
Mediterranean Sea east and west and north, include 
all lands to which, so far as we yet know, God has 
given the destinies of this earth. If, then, we find 
in this region what we want, this will, provisionally 
at least, be sufficient for us. Probably not until 
much later times will men be able to see how those 
purposes of God which worked through the other 



250 The Faith of Centuries. 

races of the farther East were to be woven in with 
the whole. 

I say, then, that there are two quarters in which we 
shall look for the preparation. But there is a difference 
between the two. It was, it seems, God's will to 
make a special preparation for the coming of His 
Son ; and the simplest way of showing that to you 
is just to point to the Old Testament. The Old 
Testament has been largely compared and contrasted 
with ancient books of other religions. On such a sub- 
ject as that you and I have largely to guide ourselves 
by the opinions of the wise and learned ; and I think 
I may fairly say that the more the Old Testament 
has been studied, and the more all that is similar in 
it to any books elsewhere has been traced out, the 
more has the uniqueness of that sacred library stood 
out. But beside the judgment of the wise and 
learned, I think we may appeal to the results. What 
a marvellous thing it is that that book, that collec- 
tion of the songs and the histories and the laws and 
the wisdom of the little people of the Jews, is to-day 
travelling all over the world, in almost countless 
languages, everywhere part of the permanent Bible ! 
The place of the Old Testament in our Bible gives, 
if you reflect upon it, a double witness : it witnesses 
generally that God made in history preparation for 
Christ, and more particularly that in Israel that prepara- 
tion took a form of special character and intensity. 

Now, what kind of preparation are we to look for ? 
I think we may rightly look for it in outward and in 
inward form. By outward form, I mean such things 



The Preparation in History for Christ. 251 

as the position and condition of the places where He 
was Himself known, and where His Gospel was first to 
be preached. If we take that Mediterranean world 
of which I have spoken, but with rather a narrower 
sense than that in which I then alluded to it — take 
it in regard to the lands immediately surrounding 
the Mediterranean — I do not think we can fail to 
see how very remarkable was the moment and the 
epoch at which Christ came. Let us fix our minds 
on two regions — the first Palestine, and the second 
that which includes the two peninsulas where sprang 
respectively the Greek and the Roman civilisations. 
Now with regard to Palestine we have recently 
received a great book. The Geography of the 
Holy Land, by Professor George Adam Smith, has 
brought out afresh what Dean Stanley had shown 
before — how extraordinarily unique was the land of 
Palestine, how central, how strangely isolated from 
other lands, and yet so placed as, when the time came, 
readily to come into touch with them and be the 
way of passage from one to another. But if we look 
across to Greece and Italy, then, I think, the power 
of geography comes out even more strongly. Look 
at them, sheltered from the north, which was ever 
the quarter of danger, by ranges of mountains which 
kept back their enemies and gave time for civilisation 
to grow ; thrust forth into the sea, of which nations 
are apt to be afraid unless it woos them, as it did 
in this case, by penetrating amongst the land in 
many creeks and gulfs ; of temperate and charming 
climate, in which human life could easily grow, and 



252 The Faith of Centuries. 

yet not be too much enervated and softened, because 
of the blended influences of mountain and sea, — such 
was Greece ; such, in some respects, was Italy too. 
And as at times in our own lives the finger of God 
seems to lay upon us a touch of which we are almost 
conscious, so I do not think that any one can read 
ancient history with a reverent and thoughtful mind 
without seeing that there was something wonderful, 
something perhaps to which in our own history the 
defeat of the Great Armada was perhaps parallel, in the 
repulse of the Persian power, when, humanly speak- 
ing, if it had come twenty years earlier, it would 
have overwhelmed Greece, and in the breakdown 
of Hannibal's genius, when, humanly speaking again, 
Rome seemed to have succumbed to it. Thus these 
two civilisations were wonderfully preserved. They 
ran into one another, and in the time of Christ there 
was what we may call the Grseco-Roman world. 
And if we look at that world — the Grseco-Roman 
world — surrounding the Mediterranean, we see the 
contrast of its then condition with what went before 
and what came after. Before, it had been broken 
into a multitude of petty states, with their interests, 
their politics, perhaps in a degree their dialects and 
their institutions, all separated from one another. 
There had been little or no inter-communication 
except between the nearest neighbours, and that 
accompanied by jealousy. Nor has there been at any 
later time a similar unity of organisation, a similar 
facility of communication, binding together so many 
centres of civilised life. It was but a few years since 



The Preparation in History for Christ. 253 

Pompey's suppression of the pirates had made the 
Mediterranean to be that highway for commerce 
and travel which the Acts so vividly show it to 
have been in St. Paul's time. There was now one 
government, the government of the Empire, over 
all these lands. There were developed methods of 
communication— the wonderful Roman roads run- 
ning down Italy, across the north of Greece, and 
into Asia Minor. There were no custom-houses and 
barriers between the different parts of the Empire ; 
there was a common language, or rather two common 
languages of Greece and Rome, and both were more 
or less current over the whole. 

And so if we compare that region with what it had 
been, or with what it was for a thousand years after, 
or even up to the present time — for think of what it 
is now, how divided and separated ! — we shall see 
how there was, as it were, in history a stage cleared 
for the appearance of Him who is confessedly its 
central figure, and a machinery organised for diffus- 
ing the tidings and knowledge of Him. That had 
largely been the work of Rome. Rome had done 
chiefly, though not entirely, the external work. Hers 
was the work of power. She is to this day our type 
of a great organising empire. But if we look for an 
inward preparation, our thoughts must be drawn at 
once to Greece ; for Rome inherited from Greece all 
that was most intellectual and cultivated in her own 
civilisation. To-day, if you go to Rome, you will 
find the sculptures of the Vatican are largely marble 
copies of lost Greek originals. It was given to Greece 



254 The Faith of Centuries. 

to be the leaven of progress and movement in the 
world's history, to be the brain of the ancient world. 
If I was asked to say in a word what the character 
of Greek civilisation had been, I think I should say 
it was man's great experiment at his own perfection, 
under the three great heads which appeal to us when 
we think of humanity at its best — liberty, beauty, and 
wisdom. As to liberty, Milton has taught us that 
there are two voices which speak for liberty — the 
voices of the mountains and of the sea ; and Greece 
had ever both those voices ringing in her ears. And 
Greek political life, as time went on, was founded, as 
you remember, upon the great war of liberty — the war 
of liberation against the impending and materially 
overwhelming Persian power. The race was one, I 
suppose — for, after all, we must not make too much 
of circumstances and environment — the race was one 
which had from the first upon it a stamp of dis- 
tinction, and, as sign or part of this, a kind of conscious 
dignity and self-reliance. Hence liberty in the state 
and liberty for the individual became more and more 
the Greek ideal ; and the language of liberty is largely 
Greek to this day. And then beauty, especially the 
beauty of the human form — it seems that in this 
Greece reached a summit. Strange as it may seem, I 
think artists will tell you that, whilst we may have 
found out many things, many subtle intricacies, many 
varied aspects for art to trace, yet for ideal perfection 
of life and form Greece did what has never else been 
done. So perfect was that beauty in their own eyes 
that we cannot wonder that they were tempted to 



The Preparation in History for Christ. 255 

make gods in their own likeness. So much were their 
thoughts cast in the mould of beauty, that when we 
pass across to their moral language we find that still 
it is as the beauty of the inward life that they treat it. 
The word for virtue in Greek is the same word that 
is used to express the excellence and perfection of 
any instrument or of any art, and the word which 
we commonly translate " the good " might also be 
translated "the beautiful." In their wisdom too the 
Greeks made man, according to the famous sentence, 
" the measure of all things " ; and so far they were on 
the right track, since, rightly probed, man's own in- 
stincts give him the keys of the spiritual knowledge 
which God meant him to have. Working on these 
lines, the Greek attained a wonderful height of noble 
thought. Plato's Idea of Good, invisible and above this 
world, of which all good things in this world partake, 
and which lends to them their reality and dignity 
and value ; Aristotle's doctrine that in contemplation 
of that which is highest and best man attains to his 
true and perfect happiness, — these are speculations as 
high as the human spirit, unaided by special revelation 
of God, and special guidance of the Spirit, has ever 
reached. Yet, let us observe it well, this experiment of 
self-perfection ended in failure. St. Paul has taught us, 
in a tremendous passage at the beginning of his Epistle 
to the Romans, how beauty was degraded by lust 
in men who were blind to God. The Greek historian 
Thucydides has traced for us the process, which was 
not complete in his time, of liberty breaking down 
through faction and selfishness. Philosophy, high as it 



256 The Faith of Centuries. 

had attained, could not secure itself at that height ; it 
sank down into a critical questioning that made it de- 
vour its own offspring ; and that question of Pilate to 
the Lord, " What is truth ? " is representative of all the 
later stages of Greek philosophy, which, though they 
differ more or less in name and form, are all alike 
philosophically sceptical. And yet, though these things 
failed, and their leaf turned sere and dry, yet they 
remain a deathless possession to the world — a witness 
of man's true glory and of his ability to attain to it 
— a standard for all time, won from his own study of 
himself, by which to try anything that claims to 
appeal to him and to bring him what he needs. Does 
it satisfy these upward aspirations and make good 
these imperfect attainments ? You know that saying 
of St. Paul that the Gospel of Christ was " to the Jews 
a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness." 
How apposite that latter word is : " Unto the Greeks " 
— with their self-reliance, their love of having things 
clear and perfect, their great confidence in man's own 
searching and understanding faculties — " foolishness." 
And you will remember how he completes it : " Unto 
those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ 
the power of God and the wisdom of God." That 
saying carries us on to the other side of our subject 
— it carries us over to the Jews. 

Here again, as in the former case, look first at the 
outward position, and think how extraordinary was 
that of the Jews at the time when Christ came. The 
Roman historian Mommsen, describing the empire of 
Julius Caesar, said that it contained three elements : 



The Preparation in History for Christ. 257 

the Romans, the Greeks, and the Jews. Strange that 
that little race, despised and disliked, with little or 
nothing left of national independence, still counts, in 
the judgment of the modern historian, for the third 
factor in the greatest power that the ancient world 
had ever seen — that empire of iron which was to 
tread down all that came before it ! You ask me 
where were the Jews at that time? Where were 
they not ? The salient feature in their position was 
that they were everywhere, scattered all over the 
world, named by the significant name of the " Dis- 
persion." Read the Acts, and trace how, at point 
after point, as St. Paul follows the lines of maritime 
commerce or the lines of the Roman roads, he finds a 
colony of Jews, with the congregation of its synagogue 
fringed, as it were, by " worshippers " and friendly 
Gentiles half converted, and largely influenced, by its 
teaching and worship. The nation has been pulverised 
and driven forth all over the world, but it has not lost 
itself amongst the nations — " not one least grain has 
fallen to the ground." It is still a unity, or an entity, 
as distinct as when it was grouped together on its 
mountain land of Palestine. It has still in Jerusalem 
a centre and a point of attachment to which it looks 
with a devotion unparalleled in any other race, because 
blent of the double strength of patriotism and faith ; 
it is in the Roman world, and yet not of that world. 
It was a strange position, but stranger still was the 
character of the people so placed. Who does not know 
something of the extraordinary and persistent dis- 
tinctiveness of the Jew ? That national distinctiveness, 

17 



258 The Faith of Centuries. 

which is still amongst us in the modern world, was 
then at least intimately connected with their reli- 
gion. An almost idolatrous reverence, carried out 
into the most elaborate detail, for a stern and 
imperious Law, served as a hard, strong husk to 
preserve the kernel of a profound and spiritual 
faith. What, then, is the importance of this Jewish 
position? Here again, as in the case of Greece, 
I think we can clearly trace what the Bishop of 
Ripon has called " the ministry of great races." The 
ministry of the Jewish race was plainly, I think, 
speaking merely as an historical observer, to carry 
forth over the world the essentials and foundations 
of a true world-religion, — a faith in God, compared 
to which all other faiths were pretty and vanishing 
fancies or else faltering and failing aspirations ; a 
faith in eternal Goodness or Holiness ; yes, and a 
faith in man, as a being in relation to God, the object 
of His law, made for His obedience, watched over by 
His care, a spiritual being in the image of Himself. 
But along with this great faith they carried a 
conviction, characteristic and unique, that in what 
God had done for them as a nation He was at work 
upon something that yet looked for accomplishment. 
They are distinctively the people of hope. Their 
hope had got abroad and made itself felt in some 
vague presentiment. The Roman Suetonius tells us 
that at that time there had somehow got abroad a 
rumour in the Eastern lands that some great ruler 
would arise. 

Now you will notice, perhaps, how likely were 



The Preparation in History for Christ. 259 

these two things — this potential world-religion, and 
this intense national hope — to clash with one another, 
so that you will readily understand how the Jews 
were at one and the same time the most cosmo- 
politan and the most exclusive of peoples. But 
now how did this people come to this strange 
outward position and to this wonderful inward 
character ? We look for the answer, and we find 
first that they are a people at the end of their history ; 
they have lived through the earlier stages of their 
childhood, have seen the strength of middle life and 
the decline of age ; they have learned the lessons 
of these past phases ; their national time of glory 
under Solomon, and in a degree under succeeding 
monarchs, is long past — they are now a province (or 
a sub-province under Syria) of the great Roman 
Empire. But before this and much earlier they had 
been, by a great catastrophe, really annihilated as 
a nation. When Nebuchadnezzar carried away the 
last of the two kingdoms into which Israel was 
divided, their history as a nation was, according to 
all precedent and analogy, at an end. But strangely 
enough there had followed a resurrection ; they had 
risen again (cf. Ezekiel xxxvii.). Such a destruction 
ordinarily meant ruin : for them it meant ruirj 
followed by restoration. It meant, in the forming 
of a nation's character, all that happens to an indi- 
vidual when he passes through one of those great 
crises in which he appears to be in face of death, 
when he "has the answer of death in himself," 
when all seems lost, and then to his amazed and 



260 The Faith of Centuries. 

grateful sight there dawns a day of hope. Again, 
such a destruction of national life meant ordinarily 
the destruction of religion. " Where are the gods 
of Sepharvaim ? " That was the characteristic taunt 
of the Assyrian invader. He meant that he had 
swept the nations, and, with them, the gods of the 
nations, into his own net. But in the one case of Israel 
their religion was neither destroyed nor absorbed 
by the conqueror. On the contrary it revived, more 
spiritual, more intense, more glowing, than it had ever 
been before the catastrophe. Do we ask why ?' The 
answer is plain. Because here in Israel there was 
that strange phenomenon, the sound of a Divine 
voice. " The word of the Lord eame unto me say- 
ing " So speaks prophet after prophet, and we 

must take them at their word. They did not feel that 
they were speaking only what they had themselves 
to say, their own best reflections, or wisest warnings 
and consolations ; but they delivered something which 
came to them to be spoken. And so the power of their 
prophecy laid hold of what was happening in history, 
and turned the stumbling-block of destruction into 
a witness to the God above ; they indicated in all the 
worst that was happening to the people fresh proof 
of the awful righteousness of God, and of His avenging 
justice upon their national sins ; yet they promised 
that there should be a future for Israel. Hence it was 
that, when the nation revived, the influence of that 
spiritual power which had saved it from death was 
dominant within it ; and the second Israel, after 
captivity, was a state of entirely peculiar character, 



The Preparation in History for Christ. 261 

a religious state, almost a Church. Its authority, as 
you remember, was that of priests and doctors of the 
Law ; its principles had been deepened and annealed 
as by a fire in the debacle of their captivity — the 
principles of unswerving obedience to Divine law, and 
of unfaltering confidence in a divinely given hope. 

Now consider what we have reached. We have 
found a nation altogether transfigured ; we have found 
the elements of a Church — that is, of a spiritual society 
— and we find these just at the time when the forces 
which created the Dispersion, breaking the old national 
boundaries, are sending forth what had been pent 
within them broadcast over the world. Surely there 
arises in us a conviction of a Divine purpose for 
Israel, in which all nations were to have a benefit, 
which should be accomplished in a glory for Israel, 
and in a vindication of the Divine righteousness, to- 
wards which a hand was, as it were, ever pointing 
on. And then, also, we see the character disciplined 
to recognise the truths of victory through suffering, of 
conquest by patience, of the possession of the earth 
by the meek — which we are apt to think of, and in 
a sense rightly to think of, as especially evangelic 
truths, because in Christ they come to a perfect 
fulfilment. Here then, as in the case of the Greek, 
we have, I put it to you, a most striking human 
result, a result of human development, suited in an 
extraordinary degree to fashion a fit situation and 
surroundings for Christ and for His Gospel. And 
surely, above and beyond anything that we find on 
the Gentile side, there is the mysterious presence of 



262 The Faith of Centuries. 

something more than human. What can we call 
it but Divine, the power of God working through 
Nature and through Man? 

II. But we are met now by the second of our two 
questions. If I have at all helped you to see how 
both the outward and inner life of Judaism were 
extraordinarily shaped to lead up to Christ, and to 
give effect to what He brought, then the question, 
as I warned you at the beginning, may come : Is 
Christianity the bloom of Judaism? The answer to 
that, my friends, is, I think, the Crucifixion of Jesus 
Christ. Or, if you like, it is to be seen in that to 
which the Crucifixion is largely owing, I mean the 
Pharisaism which was indeed the characteristic result 
and culmination of Jewish life in the time of Christ. 
While we see how the preparation positively led up 
to Christ, we must see also how another part of its 
result was the failure of man's own best efforts. I 
tried to show you that in the case of the Greek the 
experiment of self-perfection was a failure ; but in 
the case of the Jews another experiment, the experi- 
ment of self-righteousness, of self-perfection through 
perfect obedience to Divine law, was tried, and also 
failed. On the one hand the Stoic, on the other the 
Pharisee. These represent the efforts of man's spirit 
to gather itself up in the consciousness of sufficient 
wisdom, or in the consciousness of righteous com- 
pliance. The experiment goes a long way to demon- 
strate the utter failure of both methods. Certainly 
history shows no plainer or profounder lesson. The 
more we study the religious history of mankind, nay, the 



The Preparation in History for Christ. 263 

more we come back to our own hearts and lives, and 
see what it is that men really need to know, the more 
shall we understand that this lesson of the failure of 
man's own efforts — if we can go on to supplement it 
by the conviction that there is something better than 
man's effort to lead him on — is of all lessons the 
most necessary and the most wholesome. The lesson 
is written across both preparations. The Graeco-Roman 
preparation is brilliant and majestic, adorned with 
noble discernment, with marvellous power ; but yet, 
just when we should say that the progress had grown 
complete, and run through its stages, there comes 
a ghastly corruption. It has lost all the seeds of 
liberty ; it has no conviction of truth ; it is even 
beginning to lose all political power, for all power 
has been drawn from the provinces and centred in 
Rome ; and even the heart, which had gathered all 
to itself, begins in its turn to show signs of weakness. 
And then on the other side, the great Hebrew history 
has ended in this obscure and squalid and despised 
Jew, with some mystery yet of spiritual truth about 
him. These two, side by side, have each their 
own expectation. But how unlike in result ! The 
Roman expects that the empire will be eternal, 
and the Greek mind within the Roman world is for 
ever looking for some new thing, " seeking after 
wisdom," but in its own narrow way, by the experi- 
ments, tried so often and so often failing, of merely 
intellectual speculation. On the Jewish side there is 
the expectation of the permanence of the Law, which 
they regarded, because it was Divine, as eternal ; and 



264 The Faith of Centuries. 

along with it the hope of some kingdom which 
should give glory to Israel, which should be ushered 
in by a sign from heaven of a palpable and material 
kind, which should take the shape of a conquering 
monarchy before which the nations should bow 
down, and which should make the sons of the 
Gentiles ministers to the triumphant Jews. And 
these two, side by side, have lasted long enough 
to show what they could both do ; they have been 
in full contact with each other long enough to defeat 
any suggestion which might be made to us, that 
though Christ is not the result of the Gentile world, 
nor the result of the Jewish world, He is the result 
of the wedlock and blending between the two. No ; 
this too had been tried, and had had no small 
results. The preface to St. John's Gospel, with its 
deep Hebrew faith influenced by Greek knowledge 
and borrowing language from Greek thought, is one 
witness which you will at once recall. The presence 
in the synagogues of the fringe of inquirers, of 
searchers after truth, of convinced believers (like 
Cornelius the centurion) in a God of righteousness, were 
the work of that contact of Jew and Gentile in the 
Roman world. These results were valuable building 
material, but they were neither a Gospel nor a 
Christ. Both sides of the world, with all that they 
had, were palpably dying and failing. They both 
needed something of life to enter into them, to organise 
what of itself has no motive power, to make a new 
beginning, to build up, as life does so wonderfully 
build up, the material which is found to hand. 



The Preparation in History for Christ. 265 

They want a touch from God. And then at that 
moment comes something wholly unlike what either 
expected ; — there comes a lowly One who is made 
high ; there comes One who, declaring Himself as 
come from God to reveal God, calls Himself the 
Way, the Truth, and the Life — the Way which 
perfects all that the Jew had sought in the Law, the 
Truth which satisfies all that the Greek had aimed 
at in his philosophy, but also that which was neither 
Jew nor Greek : the Life. There comes a Divine 
Saviour — a mustard-seed, " smallest of all seeds," the 
mustard-seed which becomes the great tree, and fills 
with its branches the whole earth. And in Him 
the Jews who were Jews indeed, the best of the 
nation, find their spiritual representative, recognise 
their King, and see the fulfilment, beyond all their 
hopes ? of the glory of their prophecies. On the other 
side the Greeks — witness, for example, Justin Martyr, 
who had himself begun with Greek philosophy- 
find in Christ their true philosophy, open their eyes 
to a light which to their own feeling (and we must 
take from them their testimony, for it is a testimony 
of experience), illuminates all their minds and con- 
sciences with joy and light : " Christ, the wisdom of 
God ; Christ, the power of God." Then, when He 
has come, there pass but a very few years, and 
by a judgment which is typical to all time of the 
judgment of God upon the guilty and upon the 
apostate, and amid terrors which appal the world, 
Jerusalem falls. Then, too, after the lapse of a somewhat 
longer time (three or four centuries), because that 



266 The Faith of Centuries. 

was the time needed for the leaven to work in the 
lump, for the tree to spread out its branches, for the 
mustard-seed to grow in the world in spite of every 
kind of persecution — then the Roman Empire breaks 
up and passes away like a shadow, but the word of 
the Lord abideth for ever. 

My friends, the word of Jesus, who is called Him- 
self the Word, is alive and germinant to-day amongst 
us. One of the newest phases of thought, of which 
the words and suggestions are continually in our 
ears, and the conviction of which is possibly in 
the minds of some of you, Socialism I mean, is 
full of the influence of Christ. I count over the 
things which seem to me to be true and hopeful 
and inspiring in it, and I find not one of them 
which does not come from my Master. Only I 
would say, if we have learned other lessons from what 
I have so imperfectly put before you this evening ; if 
we have seen any witness that there was indeed "a 
fulness of time " when Christ came ; if we have been 
able to discern any evidence of preparation ; if, with a 
certain awe upon us of daring to trace His course 
whose " footsteps are not known," we still must 
recognise the working of the hand of Providence so 
shaping the world that His work might come about 
and might prevail, — then let us also accept this result, 
that the lesson which God thought most needful to 
teach His people was, that let them try their best 
in unconsciousness of Him, as the Greek did in the 
experiment of his self-reliance, or let them try their 
best in consciousness of Him, as the Jew did in his 



The Preparation in History for Christ. 267 

experiment of perfect obedience to righteous law, 
yet without something more from Him they must 
fail ; and that that Thing, without which there was 
for them, and is for us, no human perfection, is the 
Divine Life in man, of which Christ is the Mediator 
and Source ; that " when we are," as a race, " weak," 
then, if only we look up with faith and hope and 
love, " we are strong," for His strength, upon the page 
of history as well as upon the page of individual life, 
is " made perfect in weakness." 

Edw. Roffen. 



XIII. 

Cbriet in fbistor?* 

I. T T used at one time to be a subject of discussion 
1 among historians to determine the point, at 
which Ancient history ceased and Modern history 
began. It has been more recently contended by 
high authority that there is no such division at all, 
and that the history of humanity is one continuous 
and unbroken development, in which, strictly speak- 
ing, nothing is new and nothing is old. But while, 
of course, this more recent view is clearly right in 
teaching that the past ahyays lives in the present — 
that, for example, Greek art and philosophy, Roman 
law, Jewish religion, are all still living elements in 
our composite Christian civilisation — yet the older 
students were also right, in declaring that there was 
a real distinction between the ancient and the modern ; 
and they indicated what was the true meeting-point, 
when they dated events, and counted centuries, as 
before and after Christ. For the life of Jesus of 
Nazareth is, beyond all doubt, and without assumption 
of any theories as to its meaning, the great critical 
epoch in the history of the world. In it and through 

268 



Christ in History. 269 

it, to use well-known words, " old things passed away ; 
all things became new." 

It is true that all great lives are in some sense 
epoch-making lives. We may, indeed, trace in 
history movements of thought and aspiration, which 
thrill through the whole frame of human society, 
when great changes are at hand. Nevertheless, the 
fact remains that the few great men — great in idea, 
great in action, great in will — are the pivots, on which 
the whole revolution turns. " The hour comes " in that 
general preparation of society ; but " the man " must 
also come, to give definiteness and life to what other- 
wise would be vague and dormant — to be, in fact, the 
spark which kindles the wide-spreading spiritual fire. 

But by universal confession the place of Christ in 
history is one absolutely unique. The well-known 
words of Napoleon, one of the greatest of the world's 
great men, at St. Helena are the broad, simple 
recognition of an undoubted truth. " I think/' he 
said, " that I understand something of human nature ; 
and I tell you . . . none is like Jesus Christ. . . . Across 
a chasm of eighteen hundred years He makes a demand 
beyond all others difficult to satisfy. ... He demands 
unconditionally, and His demand is granted. . . . 
Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded 
empires. All these are men ; I am a man. Jesus 
Christ is more than man." * 

You will see from these words how irresistible was 
the inference, drawn by the union of keen-sighted 

* See the whole quotation in Liddon's Bampton Lectures, Lect. iii., 
pp. 150, 151, in Tenth Edition. 



270 The Faith of Centuries. 

genius with strong practical common sense in the 
speaker, from the fact itself. Christian faith, at any 
rate, gives an intelligible account of this unique and 
transcendent power of a Galilean peasant over the 
history of the world. For it sees in the Incarnation 
the introduction into humanity of a new principle of 
spiritual life, supernatural in comparison with the 
natural developments of life, of which yet, in the true 
sense of the word, it forms the consummation, 
"ordained before the foundation of the world." It 
crowns, while it transcends, the wonderful order, in 
which the advent of life into the inanimate world, 
and the advent into the animate world of the spiritual 
nature of humanity, are the two great steps — steps 
of which our science testifies the reality and the 
significance, while it fails utterly to trace the cause. 
On that theory this unique power of Christ in history 
is no strange thing ; it follows from the very nature 
of the case. But, if that idea be set aside, I know 
not what the wisdom of the world can put in its 
place. The choice, as has been often said, is between 
miracle and moral impossibility. 

But it is with the fact itself that I am now chiefly 
concerned. What were the effects — worldwide effects 
— which, however we may account for them, we can 
trace as absolutely and significantly real ? 

II. The first was undoubtedly this— that the pro- 
clamation of the Christ, when it was first made to the 
world, brought into harmony the three great elements 
of the ancient civilisation, and inspired them all with 
one higher life. 



Christ in History. 271 

I say the proclamation of the Christ, not merely of 
Christianity. For nothing is clearer to those who 
read the New Testament, than the error of supposing, 
as some have supposed, that the proclamation of 
Christianity was of a great system of abstract truth, 
as a Divine philosophy, or of a great scheme for the 
regeneration of society, as a Divine Republic. No 
doubt it included both these in its results. But its 
essence was the proclamation, not merely of a teaching, 
but of a Divine Teacher ; not merely of a new kingdom, 
but of a Divine King ; not merely of a regenerate 
society, but of a Saviour and a new Head of humanity. 

What were these three elements of civilisation, as 
represented in the great Roman Empire, into which 
the Lord Jesus Christ was born on earth ? 

There was the strong intellectual force of the growth 
in knowledge both of truth and of beauty, in culture 
and education, in the search into the laws of nature 
and humanity, and the inquiry into the First Cause of 
being. It was represented especially in the philosophy 
and art of Greece — then, as in other ages, the teacher 
of the world. 

There was the great moral force of law, of order, of 
justice, of sovereignty, embodied in the conception of 
the Roman Empire, as an empire of the whole civilised 
world, and the enforcer of peace among nations. 

There was the spiritual aspiration after a religion — a 
communion, that is, of the soul with a Supreme Being, 
and a King, perhaps a Father, of all men, It showed 
itself in the West, dissatisfied with the worship of many 
gods, local, national, legendary, and seeking through 



272 The Faith of Centuries. 

mysteries, and even enchantments, some one true living 
God. It had its clearer expression in the great reli- 
gions of the East— Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian. 
But its central life, at once mystic and yet living and 
practical, was in the grand worship of the One God 
in the religion of Israel. The sublime passage in 
Deuteronomy (vi. 4, 5) — " Hear, O Israel : The Lord 
our God is one Lord : and thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, 
and with all thy might " — was a message welcomed 
by serious and earnest thought in all nations. 

But these three great forces, each in its way 
universal, had their weakness in this — that they had 
little or no union and harmony with each other. 
Thus the higher philosophy and morality held them- 
selves altogether separate from religion, drawing 
nothing from it, having no bearing or influence upon 
it. There are well-known words of Cicero, as a philo- 
sopher, in which he says, " The gods may give riches 
and prosperity ; but who ever thanked the gods for 
being a good man ? " (he might have added, " a wise 
man "). " For that each must thank himself." There 
was a remarkable significance in the desperate attempt 
to give religious force to Empire by treating the 
Emperor as a god ; but in view of the human frailty 
and wickedness of the men thus deified, it became 
merely grotesque and horrible. 

Now, it is simply a fact that the proclamation of 
Christ brought all these forces together in Him in 
a perfect harmony, and brought out also — what the 
religions of the world had sought vainly to supply — 



Christ in History. 273 

a belief in a salvation which should overcome the 
power of evil, crossing, as it did, all these lines of effort 
after wisdom, after righteousness, after God. When 
St. Paul declared that He was made to us — not that 
He gave to us, but that He was made to us — " wisdom, 
righteousness, sanctification," and, in all these, "re- 
demption" (1 Cor. i. 30) — he simply expressed what 
was historically the first effect of Christ in history. 
It was the union in one of the intellectual, the moral, 
the spiritual forces, which rule and exalt humanity. 
It was a union, not for that time only, but for all time. 
Since it was embodied in a Divine Person, who could 
be infinitely believed in and reverenced and loved, it 
appealed to all classes and races and characters, to 
the few and to the many, to the leaders of humanity 
and to the rank and file of its great army. It has 
been often said that the knowledge of Christ created 
a new moral ideal for humanity. It is the truth, but 
not the whole truth. The Christian ideal is one which 
brings together the intellectual, the moral, and the 
spiritual in harmony ; and it is, moreover, an ideal 
which — account for it how you will — has manifested 
a unique power of realising itself in various degrees 
in myriads of human lives in all generations. It has 
been in the world, not merely an ideal, but a life. 

III. But let us see next how, working by the com- 
bination of these forces, the power of Christ has 
actually moulded human history. 

The answer can be given only in the barest gene- 
rality. To unfold it in detail would be to survey every 
portion of that history, and even then it would be 

18 



274 The Faith of Centuries. 

impossible to give any exhaustive estimate of its 
effects. But if we look for the most prominent effects, 
we must, I think, define them as, first, the creation of 
the Church ; next, the conquest of the world. Speaking 
roughly, we may say that the first came from the 
acknowledgment of Him as the Son of God ; the 
second from the reverence to Him as the true Son 
of Man 

The creation of a Church — it was the formation of a 
worldwide society, not bound together by the natural 
ties of race or locality, which are to the individual 
involuntary, but professing to be a Communion of 
Saints — a society, that is, of men, who believed them- 
selves to have been freely and individually drawn 
to Christ Himself, and by that spiritual contact to 
have entered on a new life of communion with God. 
From that unity with God in Him came their unity 
with one another — its motto being simply this, 
" One Lord, one faith, one baptism." Its faith was 
in the Word of Christ as the " Word of eternal life." 
The Sacraments, which marked the beginning and 
the perfection of membership in it, were declared to 
be the putting on Christ, and the partaking of His 
Body and Blood. Its creation of character was of 
that which we call " saintliness " — almost unknown 
to the pagan civilisation which it supplanted— realised 
in thousands of those who call themselves Christians. 
It has held in its hand, as its own guide for its 
witness of the world, a Book which is, in its history 
and its spiritual power, transcendently superior to 
all other books, whether masterpieces of human 



Christ in History. 275 

genius or sacred books of other religions, and which 
in all its parts is, directly or indirectly, the manifesta- 
tion of the Christ, with all that prepared for it, and 
all that was derived from it. Through that Book, 
speaking in all the languages of men, the thought 
and morality of the world have historically been 
moulded, its literature has been coloured, its religious 
life transfigured. I am not saying whether this faith 
was or was not absolutely true — whether Holy Scrip- 
ture is or is not the inspired " Word of God " — 
whether the Church is or is not really the " Body 
of Christ " through the power of the Holy Ghost. I 
am speaking only of the great historical fact of its 
formation, and of the strong vital belief on which 
that formation rested. That formation was the first 
visible manifestation of Christ in history. 

See how that manifestation developed itself. 

It began in a little knot of Jewish disciples. The 
seed sown in all the ministry of the life of Jesus of 
Nazareth yielded but a " number of names of about a 
hundred and twenty," easily contained in one large 
upper room at Jerusalem. But how rapidly it grew ! 
Even of the Jews it drew in its thousands, simply by 
the proclamation of the Christ, against all the opposi- 
tion of the world — now of Sadducean worldliness, 
now of Pharisaic fanaticism. Then spreading to the 
Hellenists — the Greek-speaking Jews of the Dispersion 
— it came into contact with the outer world. Through 
that contact it gained power to root itself everywhere 
in Gentile soil — in Asia, in Macedonia and Greece, 
in Rome itself. First scorned, then persecuted, and 



276 The Faith of Centuries. 

dreaded as a power hostile to human society, it 
advanced continually. By the end of the first century 
it was probably known almost everywhere throughout 
the Roman Empire. For two centuries it had to 
sustain a twofold conflict — a conflict with the now 
awakened hostility of that empire, most intense in 
the rulers who cared most for its welfare — a conflict 
also with all the scepticism and philosophy of 
heathen thought. But it so advanced that one of its 
great advocates (Tertullian) in the second century 
declared, " We are but of yesterday ; yet we are 
everywhere in your empire — nay, more, the Cross 
of Christ has gone farther than the eagles of Rome." 

At last the long struggle came to an end. The 
conversion of Constantine was the beginning of 
the conversion of the Roman Empire — through a 
period of some struggle still against old paganism, 
revived and spiritualised, but of far severer struggle 
in the Church itself, against heresies, rationalising 
and so impairing or destroying the mystery of the 
Christ, and against moral corruptions which worldly 
success had brought in. Finally, Christianity emerged 
as the religion of the civilised world ; and the society 
of the Church, by its nature Catholic, aspired to 
cover its whole area, and even to spread beyond it. 

Then came a troublous time. The Christianity 
of the East, enfeebled by fierce internal controversies, 
and by the corrupting influence of imperial power 
and luxury, was overborne, mutilated, subjugated 
by the ascendency of Mohammedan power ; yet 
even so holds its ground, and survives still with a 



Christ in History. 277 

marvellous tenacity of life after centuries of oppression 
and persecution. 

The leadership in Church life passed to the West. 
There, indeed, for a time the old Roman civilisa- 
tion was overwhelmed by the invasion of what 
were called the " barbarian races." But after a dark 
period of suffering and bloodshed, those very races 
were drawn into the Church of Christ, fused with 
the old Roman peoples, civilised and Christianised at 
once, to animate with new blood both the State 
and the Church, and so to become the ancestors 
of the dominant European civilisation. From that 
time onwards Chistianity through the Church has 
been the chief moulding and inspiring power in the 
growth of national life — not least in our own country 
— and so in the formation of a Christendom. It has 
had its times of torpor and apparent deadness ; it 
has felt the perversions of error and the degradation 
of superstition. But, unlike other forces in human 
society, it has always had its seasons of revival, its 
movements of reformation, throwing off all that 
corrupted and enfeebled it. 

Gradually, moreover, as European ascendency pre- 
vailed, the Church has continually extended itself to 
other countries and other races. Look only at the 
growth of our own branch of that Church, in all the 
daughter-Churches of the English-speaking race, in 
the new Churches springing up, alike amidst the old 
decaying civilisations and religions of Asia, and in 
the barbaric tribes of Africa and Polynesia. In spite 
of hindrances of strife and division, in spite of the 



278 The Faith of Centuries. 

coldness in faith and the follies and sins of professing 
Christians, still age after age it does advance with 
irresistible progress. Far yet from the hoped-for 
Catholicity, it is nevertheless the great advancing 
spiritual society of the world. What, again, is the 
natural inference from this unique power I do not 
stop to inquire. It is sufficient for me to point to the 
marvellous fact — to this first manifestation of Christ 
in history, through the formation of the one great 
international society of the Catholic Church. There 
it is unquestionably the central home of the religious 
life of humanity. Other religions have their power — 
those religions especially which, like Judaism and 
Mohammedanism, draw their life from the revelation 
now perfected in Christianity — and I doubt not that 
through the good in them God reveals Himself and 
blesses humanity. But no one, I suppose, doubts 
that, if there is to be a vital religion for man in the 
future, that religion must be Christianity, and no 
other. 

IV. But I spoke, not only of the creation of the 
Church, but of the conquest of the world, as the 
second great effect of Christ in history, which we may 
perhaps distinguish from the other, although in fact 
it is inseparately bound up with it For indeed the 
complete conquest of the world would be the world- 
wide extension of the Church. 

But by the conquest of the world I mean the power 
exercised by Christ in history, not only over the 
religious life, but over what men call the secular life 
of humanity, telling upon human society as a whole — 



Christ in History. 279 

even beyond the pale of the visible Church — even 
over those who within that pale do not really live a 
Christian life in faith and worship. It is a power 
necessarily less direct and more imperfect. But 
nevertheless it is a real, and moreover a deep and 
far-reaching, power, although hard to define from the 
very fact of its pervading influence and its manifold 
development. There are, as has been strikingly shown, 
Gesta CJiristi, outside the pale of the Church and the 
scope of a conscious faith. 

But if this pervading influence is to be defined, 1 
should be inclined to describe it mainly as the source 
of a new reverence for humanity as such. The Christ 
of history is acknowledged as the true Son of Man- 
that is, as the ideal man, the perfection of humanity — 
not as exalted above common life, but as mingling 
with that common life, even in its humblest occupa- 
tions, even in its simplest joys and sorrows. A great 
thinker of the last generation, not himself by pro- 
fession a Christian — John Stuart Mill — went so far as 
to declare that, on all moral questions of life at any 
rate, our best guide was always to inquire what on 
such questions Jesus of Nazareth would have us think 
and say and do. Hence the knowledge of Christ 
must beget a reverence for humanity as such, because 
a belief that in it is the image of God ; and this, more- 
over, in spite of the frailty, the error, and the sin which 
deface humanity. For the story of the Cross is at 
once the confession of their terrible reality and the 
promise of their defeat. So Christianity is in a true 
sense " a religion of humanity " — the only one which 



280 The Faith of Centuries. 

is engrafted, as a fruit-bearing power> upon the old 
stock of the religion of a living God. 

There is, then, in Christian civilisation a reverence 
for humanity — the humanity in ourselves and the 
humanity in others. 

The reverence for the humanity in ourselves, as 
having in it something sacred, something even Divine, 
takes, I think, two main forms, which are deeply 
impressed on Christian civilisation. 

First, the love of purity. By purity I understand 
the supremacy of the spirit within us over the appe- 
tites and lusts of the body and over the affections and 
passions of the soul — a supremacy which needs to 
be strengthened by resolute self-discipline of the will, 
but which is in itself man's true nature, his greatest 
glory and his greatest joy. It is not too much to say 
that Christianity, when it first appeared, simply re- 
created the idea of purity, in an age deeply tinged 
with Asiatic voluptuousness, with Greek recklessness, 
with the coarseness, almost the brutality, of Roman 
vice. For its strength was in the indignant inquiry, 
" Shall I take the members of Christ and make them 
the members of a harlot ? God forbid ! " and the con- 
viction that one who lives in Christ must " purify 
himself, even as He is pure." 

That purity for the mass of men was, under God's 
natural law, the purity of marriage, as the consecra- 
tion of pure earthly love, as the creator in the home 
of the best and dearest moral relations, of husband 
and wife, of parents and children. How absolutely 
the maintenance of the sacredness of marriage has 



Christ in History. 281 

rested on the faith in Christ — how constantly it is 
undermined, when that faith is dimmed or set aside, — 
all this is matter of simple experience. How could 
it be otherwise, when in that faith marriage is made 
the type of the great mystery of the Incarnation, 
and so of the relation of Christ Himself to humanity ? 

For those who have no vocation for marriage, or 
cannot venture on its responsibilities, or deliberately 
put it aside, that they may be free for the higher 
works of life, the Christian purity is the purity of 
chastity. For men and for women alike its warning 
is, " Flee youthful lusts ; keep thyself pure." Against 
false science, against self-beguiling lust, against base 
and unjust worldly practice, it declares that such 
purity is possible, is right, is glory and happiness. 
There have been times in the history of the Church, 
when its sacredness has even been exaggerated — as 
though it were infinitely above that other purity of 
marriage — as though it were the necessary rule for 
all who take up the special ministry of the Church. 
But the sense of this exaggeration does not for a 
moment prevent our acknowledgment that, for those 
who are called to it, the communion with Christ gives 
it victorious power over lust. " Walk in the Spirit, 
and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh." 

How imperfectly, alas ! that voice is heard in 
communities professedly Christian, we confess with 
bitter shame — shame at the condition of our London 
streets — shame at the base and corrupting tone of 
much of our popular literature. But the fact remains, 
that the one influence which, beyond all others, 



282 The Faith of Centuries. 

stems the dark torrent of sensual evil, strengthens 
the innocent, rescues the fallen, is the power of 
Christ in the hearts and lives of His true followers. 

But the reverence for the humanity in ourselves 
takes another form, less obvious perhaps, but very 
real, in the assertion of freedom, and with it of indi- 
vidual responsibility. You know how much there is 
to overbear freedom — the tyranny of force, the tyranny 
of custom, the tyranny of public opinion. Slavery 
of one kind or another is an abuse all but primeval 
in humanity. You may know, again, how much 
tendency there is to deny the reality of freedom, 
because it is mysterious, — now in the name of the 
science of physical law — now in the worship of 
society as a whole, in which the individual is but 
as a grain of sand — now in the name of religion 
itself, as in the unmitigated fatalism of Islam, or 
the mitigated but virtual fatalism of some forms of 
Christianity. But the very knowledge of the true 
Son of Man scatters to the winds all these dark 
fancies of an iron necessity, in face of which free-will 
is but a delusion ; and it nerves men to stand up for 
their liberty against all these forms of tyranny. "We 
must obey God," was the Apostolic declaration, 
" rather than man." " I fear God," it was said ; " I 
have no other fear." " I love God," would be the 
more Christ-like utterance, "and I know no power 
over me, which can overbear that love." 

It is in this consciousness of a communion with 
God in Christ — in which, to use well-known words, 
we are " conscious of but two existences, God and 



Christ in History. 283 

our own soul " — that the essential life of Christian 
freedom consists. It has been noted that in the 
New Testament there is but one passage (1 Cor. 
xvi. 13) in which the manliness, which is the asser- 
tion of strong individuality, so highly prized in the 
thought and practice of the world, is even touched 
upon. But it has also been noted (as, for example, 
by Mr. Lecky) that in Christendom that manliness 
has developed itself, in the unconquerable endurance 
of the martyr, in the self-contained life of the ascetic, 
in the almost fantastic bravery of chivalry, to an 
extent which ante-Christian days never knew. For 
men could defy the world simply through knowledge 
of Him, who came freely to do the will of God, and 
who for that joy " endured the cross and despised 
the shame." 

I know, indeed, that there have been times when 
Christianity has betrayed its trust, by allying itself 
with tyranny over life, and by wielding a cruel 
despotism over thought. But that these things 
are treason against its true idea, and that they mar, 
but cannot destroy, its essential freedom, is obvious 
to all who think. For the sense of freedom lies at 
the core of all reverence for humanity ; and the 
Christian service, as a service of love, is " perfect 
freedom." 

But even more obvious than this reverence for 
humanity in ourselves is the creation by Christianity 
— that is, by Christ Himself known and loved — of 
reverence for the humanity in others ; and this, more- 
over, a reverence glowing with the spirit of charity in 



284 The Faith of Centuries. 

the largest sense — the glad self-sacrifice, that is, for 
the sake of others, especially the helpless and the weak. 

There are, as we see every day, two balancing 
forces in the growth of human society. There is, 
on the one hand, the instinct of self-preservation, 
self-interest, self-assertion, which is the development 
in us of that " struggle for existence " and " survival 
of the strongest," which we trace in the animal 
creation. There is, on the other hand, the spirit 
of what we significantly call "humanity," because, 
though it has its rudimentary forms in the lower 
animals, it comes to perfection in man.* It is the 
spirit of self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice of the 
strong for the weak, of the good for the evil. It 
has been rightly shown that the increasing superiority 
of this latter force is the true social evolution, the 
victory of true civilisation over barbarism. It has 
been shown also that the inspiring force of this social 
evolution is religion.f But when men speak nowadays 
of religion, they practically mean Christianity. For 
it is Christ in history who has made the brotherhood 
of humanity, not a theory or an aspiration, but a true 
though imperfect reality under the Fatherhood of God. 

Out of this sense of brotherhood has naturally 
grown in all Christian civilisation that enthusiasm 
of care for the welfare of humanity — its material, 
its intellectual, its social, above all its moral and 

* See a striking investigation of this development of the self-sacrifice 
of the individual for the life of the race, from instinct in the animal 
creation to moral consciousness in man, in Professor Henry Drummond's 
Ascent of Man. 

f See Kidd's Social Evolution. 



Christ, in History. 285 

spiritual welfare— which is true charity. Human 
society, for its own preservation, must maintain 
some laws of righteousness, and even foster some 
sense of public duty. But the power of Christ has 
for its peculiar glory the enthusiasm of love — the 
commandment " old from the beginning, but new " 
in Christ and those who are His — which goes beyond 
the strict letter of righteousness, and gives life and 
glow to the rigid sense of duty. It has become a 
commonplace to remark that the word which signifies 
11 love " in the general sense, as distinct from passion 
and personal friendship, is found only in the New 
Testament Greek, because the thing signified is the 
creation of Christianity. That love impresses itself 
to some extent even on the action of a Christian 
society through law ; even against this public opinion 
cries out, if it is too hard and cold and ungracious. 
But it is in voluntary works of good of all sorts and 
kinds, that it finds its freest, its most exuberant 
development ; and it is just in these, let me remark, 
that the inspiring force of religious faith, and of 
its aspiration for likeness to Christ Himself, is most 
obviously the dominant power. It has often been 
remarked that, if you walk through the ruins of 
old pagan civilisation, you will find traces of national 
and civic magnificence, of private or public pleasure 
and luxury. But what you will not find are traces 
of those institutions of beneficence, which are natural 
and universal in a Christian civilisation. 

But this enthusiastic care for humanity, while it 
regards society as a whole, and while it should 



286 The Faith of Centuries. 

strive earnestly to secure in it all the conditions 
of happiness and goodness, yet catches its special 
inspiration from Christ Himself, in tenderness to 
its individual members. That tenderness has two 
striking developments. There is, first, the especial 
Christ-like tenderness to the humbler and weaker 
members of the whole body, striving to protect and 
save them in the fierce battle of life. To the poor 
and the suffering that tenderness is so conspicuous 
and so strong, that it has almost limited to this 
phase of its exercise the sacred name of Charity. 
How notably, again, though after long struggle and 
many failures and shortcomings, has Christianity — 
largely by the leadership of English Christians 
— destroyed in the main that slavery which was 
a recognised institution in all ancient civilisation ! 
How earnestly does Christian influence seek to 
protect and exalt the subject-races of the world, 
brought into contact, often collision, with its domi- 
nant races, through commerce, settlement, dominion ! 
Less effectually, I fear, but yet honestly and not 
altogether in vain, does it strive to stay or to mitigate 
the horrors of war, which is simply the dominance of 
force, to make strong nations recognise the rights 
of the weak, and through arbitration substitute 
right for might. Nay, that care for the weak and 
helpless extends beyond humanity itself to the 
lower animal creation, and rightly makes cruelty to 
them, even for the supposed interests of mankind, 
not only a sin before God, but a crime before 
human law. 



Christ in History. 287 

And yet I do not know whether there is not some- 
thing more striking and more distinctly traceable 
to the likeness to Christ in the tenderness shown 
even to the evil, the traitors and enemies to society 
itself. Through that influence humanity extends 
even to the criminal ; the infliction of torture and 
excessive severity is forbidden in Christian countries ; 
the very idea of punishment has refused to be content 
with inflicting vengeance and inspiring wholesome 
terror, without trying to work for the reformation of 
the criminal and his restoration to society. Through 
that influence, even more distinctly, countless agencies 
of rescue have sprung up for the wretched victims and 
instruments of the sensual vices — as, for example, of 
drunkenness and impurity — utterly refusing to despair 
of the humanity, defaced and polluted, but still sacred, 
in them. There may be cases in which the tenderness 
may seem to run to excess. But even so it is but an 
exaggerated imitation of Him, who was decried as 
"the friend of publicans and sinners." In spite of 
inevitable failures, of bitter disappointments, it per- 
severes in the spirit of Christ ; and it labours not in 
vain. It counts by hundreds the victims of a demo- 
niacal possession of evil, whom it brings to the feet of 
the Master, clothed once more in true humanity and 
after long madness in their right mind. I remember 
hearing an honest and outspoken leader of non- 
Christian thought tell from his own experience that the 
rescuers of men and women in the slums of our crowded 
cities from degradation of body and soul were not the 
students, the scientists, the philosophers, but the 



288 The Faith of Centuries. 

parsons and the Scripture-readers, the Sisters and 
the Bible- women. It was no wonder ; for these last 
had One who went before them, and who cried, 
" Follow Me." 

V. These, my brethren, are some of the most 
obvious and undoubted aspects of the influence of 
Christ on history — the Christ, be it remembered, of 
the New Testament and the Creeds, Son of God 
and Son of Man — not the Jesus of Nazareth of some 
modern theories, simply the greatest and best of men, 
and yet, we are forced to add, One whom on that 
theory we are puzzled to understand, because He 
and His Apostles undoubtedly claimed for Him that 
He was and is infinitely more. 

It is indeed — and, as the world grows older, we 
feel it more and more — a sore trial to our faith, that 
even now that Divine influence for good is so greatly 
resisted by the forces of evil, and — what is worse — 
so sorely marred by the follies and sins of those who 
accept it, and seek to spread it to others. But while 
there should be a Divine discontent with the world as 
it is, and with ourselves as we are, which must stir 
us to work more energetically and pray more earnestly, 
yet it should not blind us to the unique and tran- 
scendent reality of even this imperfect power. If the 
New Testament is to be trusted, our Lord Himself 
foresaw, and, so to speak, provided for, this imper- 
fection. The prophecy of the future, both from His 
own lips and those of His Apostles, foreshadowed a 
continual and ever-growing conflict of the powers of 
good and evil — to be ended only, as Advent reminds 



Christ in History. 289 

us, by a Second Coming, which is to us miraculous, 
a new departure in the dispensation of God. 

But whatever we may think and expect as to the 
future, there the influence stands, unique and un- 
approachable, in the past and in the present. To 
our age it should have a special significance. For in 
all lines of thought what is called the historical method 
is dominant ; we judge of the nature and the truth of 
things by study, not of what they profess to be and 
ought to be, but of what they are and what through 
the ages they have gradually grown to be. 

I am fully aware that this study looks upon Jesus 
Christ, as it were, from without. Perhaps St. Paul 
would have called it a mere " knowledge of Him after 
the flesh."* If we would not merely know about 
Him, but know Himself, it must be by the Spirit from 
within, trying by our own experience whether He is 
a Light in the darkness of our ignorance, a Saviour 
from the power of our sin, a Giver of strength and 
nobleness and purity to our life. But just as, when 
He was upon earth, those who saw His miracles were 
drawn to Him, to listen to His word, to know Him 
in His life, so now the study of the wonderful work 
of Christ in history, both in the Church and in the 
world, should at least prepare us to try whether we 
cannot know Him with that inner knowledge of which 
I have spoken. With Nicodemus we shall say at 
once, " No man could do the wonders in history which 
He has wrought, unless God were with Him."f But 
gradually, as we look more closely into the matter 

* 2 Cor. v. 16. f John iii. 2. 

19 



290 The Faith of Centuries. 

we shall pass through the order of the Apostolic con- 
fessions in St. John's Gospel.* We see, first, with 
St. Andrew, that there is in Him a universal royalty, 
such as was prophesied of the Messiah ; we see, next, 
how, through all the perplexities and mysteries of 
this world, men have found, with St. Peter, that He 
" has the words of eternal life." But we cannot stop, 
when we have gone so far as this ; for we see clearly 
what are the transcendent claims implied in this 
assertion of Himself as the King and the Light of 
the world ; and, unless with the Jews we cast stones at 
Him as a blasphemer, we must cry out with St Thomas, 
" My Lord and my God ! " 

Alfred Barry. 

* John i. 41 ; vi. 68, 69; xx. 28 



XIV. 

IRature anfc fIDiracIe. 

NEARLY a century and a half ago David Hume 
enunciated a principle which expresses in a 
very concise form the' difficulty which many, before 
and after his days, have felt on the subject of miracles. 
It amounts, in effect, to this — that it is contrary to 
experience that a miracle should be true, but not 
contrary to experience that testimony should be 
false. The defect in the former of the two clauses 
did not escape the acute perception of his well- 
known opponent Archdeacon Paley. To a certain 
extent it begs the question, unless it be expressed 
with a limitation, viz. that it is contrary to our 
own experience, and to that of those persons with 
whom we are more or less acquainted. The latter 
clause, however, makes a statement which is corrobo- 
rated by every-day experience. But though the 
two canons are not of equal value, we must admit 
that the possibility of mistake, the danger of decep- 
tion, the liability to misrepresentation, are so great 
that we are justified in regarding all narratives 

of miraculous events with a certain amount of 

291 



292 The Faith of Centuries. 

scepticism, though we cannot imitate the airy self- 
confidence of a well-known modern authoress in 
her oracular pronouncement, " Miracles do not 
happen." 

But it is always important to ask ourselves at the 
outset the meaning of any term which we are em- 
ploying, and in no case is this more necessary than with 
the word " miracle." What does it mean ? According 
to Dr. Johnson, the primary sense of the word is " a 
wonder, something above human power," to which 
is added, as a secondary and theological sense, 
"performed in attestation of some truth." In the 
Greek Testament three words are used which would 
be covered by this one term — namely, Prodigy, Sign, 
and Power.* Of these the first may or may not 
be an attestation of truth ; the second may be 
in itself a thing unimportant, which only becomes 
significant as an attestation of truth ; while the third 
refers rather to the force of which the miracle is the 
result, but on the whole perhaps most nearly among 
the three represents that word in its usual sense. 

To say that a thing contrary to our experience 
cannot happen would be an absurdity, for such an 
assertion would be sure to place us before long in 
the dilemma of having to choose between abandoning 
it or refusing to accept the evidence of our senses. 
But some will probably say : " It is not so much 
the novelty of the phenomenon which makes us 
suspicious as its opportuneness. You ask us to 
believe that, in order to obtain acceptance of certain 

* Viz. T^pas, S^yLtetov, Awd/MS. 



Nature and Miracle. 293 

statements or to support certain claims, the laws of 
nature were violated. We find ourselves accordingly 
in this difficulty : If these laws of nature required to 
be so often amended, what becomes of the attri- 
butes which you insist on ascribing to their Author ? " 
The objection is specious, but it is partly due to 
and strongly favoured by a misconception which we 
find it very difficult to eliminate from our minds. 
Our conceptions are only obtained, or at any rate 
formulated, by means of our senses. Hence, as 
the latter are limited by the finite, the conceptions 
formed by means of them must be similarly re- 
stricted. Becoming to ourselves a natural standard 
of reference, we extend this to our ideas of God. 
Thus our conceptions of Him cannot fail to be 
anthropomorphic. For long the world had no 
other choice than between the vagueness of pan- 
theism and the clear but misleading definiteness 
of anthropomorphism. Hence the latter still tinges 
theology, especially its more popular forms, to an 
extent that is seldom realised. Under its sway 
we find ourselves falling constantly, it may be in- 
evitably ; and yet we are compelled to admit that, 
unless we consent to employ its symbols as vehicles 
for thought, we have great difficulty in making any 
progress. 

The idea, then, that a miracle involves an inter- 
ference with the order of nature is founded upon an 
inadequate and misleading conception, which exists 
in the minds of very many people. They regard 
the Almighty as standing to nature in this world 



294 The Faith of Centuries. 

(to speak of nothing beyond it) in the relation of 
a head engineer, who has devised and designed 
machinery which, as a general rule, works admirably. 
But now and then cases occur where, as the juncture 
is unusual, this machinery would prove inefficient. 
He must therefore intervene, with the result that 
the ordinary laws of nature are set aside ; something 
supernatural occurs — in other words, a miracle. Now 
all these words, " intervene," " laws of nature/' 
" supernatural," " miracle," convenient as they may be 
as symbols for every-day use, are nevertheless, as we 
hope to show, very apt to be misleading. Thus the 
difficulty in which we are entangled is to a certain 
extent of our own creating. 

We have already seen that the scepticism aroused 
by a miraculous story is mainly, if not wholly, 
due to its theological associations — in other words, 
our suspicions are aroused by its connection with 
revelation. It is therefore necessary that at the 
outset we should have our minds quite clear on 
one point — namely, whether we believe that a reve- 
lation (using the word in its ordinary sense) is 
a thing so antecedently improbable, not to say 
impossible, that we do not believe it ever has 
occurred or can occur. If this be so, there is an 
end of the whole matter, and we must leave it with 
the remark that in such cases, since our conceptions 
of God are founded only on human experience, 
they must be either merely negative or so extremely 
limited as to be of no real value. If, however, we 
believe a revelation to be possible, then, since it is 



Nature and Miracle. 295 

certainly a thing contrary to ordinary experience, 
not explicable by known laws or in accordance with 
them, we have conceded the possibility of a miracle. 
Hence the latter term, when applied to the natural 
order, does not really predicate more than the 
operation of a force in it analogous to, if not iden- 
tical with, that which in the moral or spiritual 
order results in revelation. 

There are, however, some persons who, though so 
far theists as to grant that revelation in one form or 
another is possible, and may be admitted to have 
occurred, still object to miracles as upsetting all our 
ideas of law and introducing an arbitrary disturbing 
force into the cosmos. Let us then look a little 
further into this objection. In the first place we 
venture to remark that to use the term " arbitrary " is 
to beg the question ; and in the second we entirely 
demur to the propriety of the epithet "disturbing," 
unless it be applicable to everything which has only 
few precedents. There may be discontinuity in a 
series of phenomena in nature, though the cause to 
which it is due is acting continuously. I will quote 
two instances. They may be termed hackneyed, but 
that does not make them the less appropriate. Water 
remains a fluid, and is reduced in volume till it 
reaches a temperature of 3 2° F. ; then it suddenly 
becomes solid, and expands very considerably. Such 
a phenomenon is perfectly familiar to people who live 
in a climate like our own ; but how would it seem 
to careful though untravelled observers inhabiting a 
tropical island in the Pacific Ocean ? Again, if, after 



296 The Faith of Centuries. 

placing a grain of blasting powder on the iron plate 
at the top of a stove, we light the fire, for a time 
nothing happens ; then, as the temperature rises, first 
a pale blue flame becomes visible, and at last the 
grain disappears with an explosion. This to the 
above-named observer might look like the magician's 
art ; it would have seemed so both to Saxon and to 
Norman, when they fought for mastery in England. 
But it may be said, " These are no wonders ; they are 
matters of common, every-day experience : every lad 
is perfectly familiar with them." Yes, " every lad " in 
certain countries, but not even now in every part 
of the world. For the present I concede that these 
cases are not completely analogous to a miracle, but I 
quote them to show that the objection " contrary to 
experience " cannot be pressed to an extremity unless 
we are convinced that our experience, or at any rate 
that of the human race, at the present time, may be 
safely accepted as the ultimate measure of all know- 
ledge — or, in other words, that the development of 
the human intellect has now attained its utmost 
possible limit. This would be an assumption on 
which, if it were adopted, I should like to hear the 
remarks of posterity. Few, however, I imagine, will 
venture to take up that position. The experience of 
the last quarter of a century alone should be enough 
to warn us against adopting it, whether consciously 
or unconsciously ; for if so many and such unexpected 
discoveries have been made in that limited period, the 
years which are to come may be reasonably expected 
to be not less fruitful. 



Nature and Miracle. 297 

Some persons, however, may raise the following 
objection : A miracle presents to us a phenomenon 
which is either unaccountable or contrary to expecta- 
tion ; it is as though (to recur to the examples already 
quoted) water should contract instead of expand in 
the act of freezing or become solid at (say) 40 R, 
or as though the grain of powder should explode at 
blood heat — in other words, it is as if the same causes 
did not always lead to the same consequences. Un- 
doubtedly, if the same causes were not followed by 
the same results, we must cease to talk of " law " in 
nature. We may accept the connection of cause and 
consequence as an axiom, but in proceeding to apply 
it to the question of the credibility of miracles we 
must be careful not to make a tacit assumption, as 
is very commonly done, that the causes are identical 
in reality because they are so in appearance. The 
progress of science during the last quarter of a 
century has given us some useful warnings against 
over-hasty assumptions about the completeness of our 
knowledge. Among others, the following statements, 
significant in regard to the matter before us, have 
been verified : — 

(1) That the presence of a constituent in any 
material, provided it be in small quantities and either 
not expected or not hitherto known, may be very 
easily overlooked. (2) That the presence of minute 
quantities of extraneous matter may very con- 
spicuously modify the properties of the substance 
in which they occur. (3) That in the results thus 
produced inexplicable anomalies may be sometimes 



298 The Faith of Centuries. 

observed. (4) That we have still very much to learn 
in regard even to things supposed to be quite ordinary 
and familiar. 

I will mention a few instances to illustrate the 
meaning and point the moral of the statements : — 

(a) Till about a couple of years ago the composition 
of atmospheric air was supposed to be completely 
known. Yet it was then ascertained * that a very 
small quantity of at least one other constituent was, 
so far as we know, invariably present. This con- 
stituent in itself is rather anomalous, for it is dis- 
tinguished by a singular inertness, which has earned 
it the name of argon. What it is doing in the 
atmosphere, what is its function, no man knows. But 
it would be rash to assert that because we deem it 
inert it is therefore useless. 

(J?) That the addition of a small quantity of 
a foreign substance sometimes intensifies a process 
which has already commenced. Molten iron at the 
ordinary temperature of the furnace employed for its 
fusion is still somewhat pasty or viscid. But if a 
little aluminium be added, only to the extent of one 
two-thousandth part of the weight of the iron, the 
mixture quickly becomes almost as fluid as water. 

(c) All students of metallic alloys are now well 
aware that the admixture of small quantities of one 
substance may greatly affect the properties of an- 
other. This fact was demonstrated by an experiment 

* By Lord Rayleigh and Professor W. Ramsay. The discovery was 
announced in 1895. The identification of helium as a terrestrial 
constituent was a similar case. 



Nature and Miracle. 299 

performed during a lecture, given by Professor Roberts- 
Austen, at a meeting of the British Association in 
1886. He melted in a crucible a considerable quantity 
of gold, and then removing a portion cast it into 
a small bar — perhaps three inches long, and about a 
third of an inch broad and thick. This he bent with 
pincers into a horseshoe shape, and showed it to 
possess the usual properties of gold. The remaining 
contents of the crucible were then cast into another 
bar of not less than double the dimensions.* To the 
bystanders this appeared, like the other, to be also 
pure gold ; but the lecturer broke it into two pieces 
with a smart blow from a hammer.- Of course the 
two masses were not identical. Something had 
destroyed the malleability of the gold, and that 
" something " could have been detected by chemical 
analysis, though the operation would have required 
care. This is what had happened : The lecturer, after 
removing the first portion of gold from the crucible, 
had secretly dropped into it a pellet of lead, amount- 
ing in weight to one-thousandth part of the remaining 
metal. This minute quantity was enough to change 
gold from a very malleable to a rather brittle metal. 

(d) These introductions of foreign substances some- 
times produce results apparently anomalous or even 
contradictory. Manganese, as is well known, affects 
the properties of steel, but the result depends upon 
the relative proportions of the two metals. Manganese 

* These statements of sizes are given from memory, but I believe 
them to be fairly accurate, for I was sitting on the platform near to the 
lecturer. 



300 The Faith of Centuries. 

up to about 275 per cent, toughens the steel ; but 
when that amount is exceeded, the alloy becomes 
gradually more brittle, the maximum effect being 
obtained when the manganese is from 4 to 5 per cent. ; 
but afterwards, when it varies from 7 to 20 per cent, 
the alloy is again strengthened and toughened. I 
think that if any practical metallurgist or even scien- 
tific chemist fifty years ago had heard this stated as a 
fact, he would have received it in a very sceptical spirit. 

(e) I will quote but one other example, also a result 
of Professor Roberts-Austen's remarkable investiga- 
tions as a scientific metallurgist. Students of physics 
have been for long familiar with the phenomenon of 
diffusion in gases and fluids, but to speak of it in 
solids would have seemed a contradiction in terms. 
Yet he has shown that if a plate of gold be placed 
(under very moderate temperatures and pressures) 
beneath a piece of lead, the surface of the two being 
carefully prepared, so as to secure a perfect contact, 
an appreciable quantity of the gold, at the end of less 
than a month, will be found disseminated in the lead.* 

One other discovery, also very recent, but belonging 
to another branch of science, reads us similar lessons. 
I refer to the Rontgen or X rays, which during the 

* It would be easy to multiply instances of like nature to the above, but 
these may suffice to warn us against over-confidence in the extent of our 
knowledge, and against over-hasty conclusions that circumstances which 
appear to be identical are always so in reality. 

See, for an account of this and other remarkable experiments, 
Professor W. C. Roberts-Austen "On the Diffusion of Metals, " Phil. 
Trans. , vol. clxxxvii. (1896), p. 383; and for the effects of alloys, 
Reports of the British Association, 1889, p. 723, and 1890, p. 18. 



Nature and Miracle. 301 

last two years have fascinated students of physics and 
have excited the wonder of the public. Before then it 
would have seemed romancing to talk of photograph- 
ing the skeleton within a living body, the coins inside a 
leather purse, the scissors in a workbox, and the like 
— to predict, in short, that, of two substances equally 
opaque to ordinary light, one would be diaphanous 
to these rays. Nor is that all. Suppose that after a 
limited number of experiments the results had led to 
the inference, as probably they would have done half 
a century ago, that these rays could pass through 
compounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, 
but were arrested by metals and a number of other 
bases. Would it not then have seemed rather 
miraculous to find aluminium transparent, while 
calcium was opaque ? Yet such is the case. These 
rays evidently are not identical with ordinary light ; 
they are vibrations no doubt, but of what kind we do 
not at present know, except that they differ not only 
from such light, but also from heat and electricity. 
Ultimately we shall know, or at any rate shall extend 
the range of our present knowledge — to what extent, 
however, the future must determine. I refer to these 
Rontgen rays, and to those other forms of light — if 
we may so call them — which have been even more 
recently discovered, in order to show that our know- 
ledge of inorganic nature is not yet complete, and that 
there may still be forces in its order which, though 
hitherto they have escaped the notice of scientific 
investigators, bring about results so startling that not 
long ago they would have seemed miraculous. For 



302 The Faith of Centuries. 

it must be remembered that these and perhaps other 
modes of energy (for so I presume we may designate 
them) must operate, must be producing effects, in the 
world, whether we are conscious of them or not ; so 
that a knowledge wider and deeper than ours may 
have at its command resources of which we in our 
ignorance have never dreamed. 

But the above-named instances, it may be objected, 
refer only to the inorganic side of nature's order, 
while the organic more often is the sphere of the 
miraculous. But in the latter, as it seems to me, 
we are daily confronted by so many mysteries, by so 
many things, which we cannot explain or understand, 
that a priori difficulties, on the ground of apparent 
departure from law, or of consequences for which 
no adequate cause can be assigned, seem really to 
be diminished rather than increased. For instance, 
to some persons miracles of healing, the restoration of 
life to the dead, appear so incredible as hardly to 
deserve serious consideration. I grant that under 
certain circumstances, which for the moment I pass 
over, they would not. But are we so certain that we 
know what life is, that we perfectly understand its 
relation to the organism, and still more that of the 
will to the body, that we can venture to lay down the 
law as to what is possible or impossible, or refuse to 
listen to anything which does not square with our 
preconceived opinions ? 

The subject would require for adequate discussion 
more space and more technical knowledge than is 
at my command ; but I may call attention to a few 



Nature and Miracle. 303 

phenomena which are, I believe, generally accepted as 
true, and which seem to indicate the need of caution 
in forming our conclusions. 

I will mention first one of which most adults have 
had some experience — the effect of anxiety or sorrow 
upon the health. I know perfectly well — probably 
many others do — that to receive bad news will pro- 
duce certain physical effects, on which it is needless 
to dwell ; digestion, sleep, nervous power, all suffer 
But this cannot be the result of a process merely 
physical. One can understand that to receive a blow 
on certain parts of the body may impede the digestion 
of food ; but how can this effect be produced by 
glancing at certain marks on paper, or by the impact 
of certain sound-waves on the drum of the ear? It 
must be something more than the shape of the 
characters or the rhythm of the waves ; for you might 
convey the news either to eye or ear in any one of 
half-a-dozen languages, and the result would be the 
same. Something within my body — the totality of my 
organism, if you like so to call it — lays hold of this 
information, and in consequence of it proceeds to 
throw the machine out of gear. This, I am aware, is 
an unphilosophical way of stating the matter. It would 
be easy to drape the facts with a metaphysical and 
medical terminology ; but should we be any nearer to 
understanding or explaining them ? To give a name 
to a phenomenon is not to ascertain its cause, though 
many seem so to think — an illusion which, I fear, is 
occasionally prevalent even among scientific men. 

But the consequences of what is called " shock/' both 



304 The Faith of Centuries. 

to the health of the organism and even to life itself, are 
well known to every student of medicine. Its effects 
are not restricted to wounds, falls, or bodily injuries ; 
but anything which causes extreme anxiety or fright, 
especially if sudden, produces a marked effect on 
the vital functions ; the circulation of the blood is 
diminished : the action of the heart is enfeebled, until 
it may altogether cease, and death ensue, though 
no lesion or physical injury can be detected. The 
physician might be able to affirm that the man had 
" died of fright," but the autopsy would not tell him 
why this had proved fatal. 

The phenomena of hysteria are also important, for 
they show that illnesses may exist in which, if there 
be any organic change, it is the result rather than 
the cause of the patient's condition. The phenomena 
of this singular malady are too multitudinous for 
description here, but may be found in text-books of 
medicine. Suffice it to say that they produce some- 
times local insensibility to pain, sometimes exceptional 
sensitiveness to it, sometimes sufferings which have no 
assignable cause. These may resemble the effects of 
some organic mischief : now it may be disease of a 
joint, now of the vertebrae, now of the stomach, or of 
other important organs. But they have no cause that 
can be discovered ; in a sense they are imaginary, for 
the observer finds that they are increased by inquiry 
and sympathy, and are apt to cease suddenly when 
the patient's attention is diverted to some object 
which causes forgetfulness of self. Yet, unless checked, 
the results on health, even on life, may become most 



Nature and Miracle. 305 

serious, and the perversion of the mind or will (if 
these be regarded as distinct) leads to important 
organic changes. Even in cases of insanity some- 
times no adequate cause can be discovered ; certain 
bodily functions may be affected and become irregular, 
but without any reason to suppose that this disturbance 
produces the deranged mental condition. 

The phenomena of hypnotism may be placed in 
the same category. With this no doubt, whether 
it be called hypnotism or mesmerism or animal 
magnetism, much fraud and imposture unfortunately 
has been associated. Nevertheless, we may venture 
to say that a number of remarkable and inexplicable 
facts have been substantiated. By a mechanical con- 
trivance, or at the will apparently of the operator 
if a fit subject for experiment be found, a state or 
sleep can be induced, which produces insensibility to 
pain, sometimes as completely as chloroform or a 
similar anaesthetic. Besides this the mental balance 
may be overthrown or consciousness only partially 
lost, so that the patient will imitate every action of 
the operator, will accept his suggestions, will believe 
his statements, though their falseness may be patent, 
and will obey his orders automatically, though 
previously they would have seemed absurd or wrong. 
He becomes, as it were, the mere slave of the other — to 
the extent sometimes, that for long after the operation, 
through what is called hypnotic suggestion, he will 
cease to desire something in which he once delighted, 
or will do that which would have been repulsive to 
his true self. 

20 



306 The Faith of Centuries. 

The evidence of the senses may mislead us more 
often than we suppose. They are the only witnesses 
at our command, and we must make the best of them ; 
but they are neither infallible nor absolutely trust- 
worthy. Even a sane man, if a little over-wrought, 
may be the victim of an hallucination. A dog may 
seem to lie on the philosopher's hearth-rug, a man to 
sit by the student's table, spectral forms may ride by 
our side or may accompany us on our walks, and yet 
we may be otherwise unconscious of any derangement 
of health, and may be in all other respects perfectly 
sane. The majority of ghost stories no doubt are 
false ; but some are probably true — at least in a certain 
sense of the word. The man or woman was convinced 
that he or she saw something, but it was a subjective 
impression, not an objective vision.* 

One other matter must be briefly mentioned, as 
having some bearing on this question — the pheno- 
mena which commonly are collectively denominated 
"spiritualism." These also have been so often associated 
with imposture, in so many cases are the results of 
clever trickery on the part of so-called mediums, and 
of considerable credulity on the part of observers, 
that one almost hesitates to mention the subject, so 
difficult is it to disentangle truth from falsehood, and 

* It is a significant fact, as bearing on this matter, that when a ghost 
appears it is always clothed, generally as in life. But are we to believe 
that inanimate objects have doubles ? It is possible, of course, that a 
something or somebody is near the person who sees the ghost, which 
produces impressions thus translated by the nerves and brain into bodily 
form and apparent vision ; but that is a question which we have no 
means of determining. 



Nature and Miracle. 307 

to know how far the witnesses of alleged phenomena 
can be trusted.* But making every allowance for 
this, and avoiding as far as possible placing any 
confidence in experiments with professional mediums, 
there seems to be a residuum — though it may be a 
small one, comparatively speaking — of well-established 
phenomena which are difficult to explain by the laws 
and forces with which we are at present acquainted ; 
in other words, there seem to be powers, whether we 
ascribe them to the will or to anything else, which 
produce unaccountable influences upon material 
objects, and more particularly upon living organisms. 
In this connection we may remember, for it is not 
without significance, that at least one present-day 
school of philosophy (and that by no means Christian) 
holds "will" to be the sole ultimate reality, and 
regards the material cosmos as called into being and 
only existing through it. 

These facts — the barest summary of what must 
suffice, for to enter into details would too much enlarge 
the present essay — indicate how greatly the health 
and organic structure of any person may be affected 
by his own imagination or by the will of another. 
Cases of so-called faith-healing have really occurred ; 
there have been pilgrims who have been cured by 
visits to sacred places, or by the touch of relics and 
amulets. Granted that often there has been much 
exaggeration, and perhaps not seldom something 

* In some cases, when their good faith is beyond question, the 
circumstances lead one to suspect that they may have been under 
hypnotic influence. 



308 The Faith of Centuries. 

worse ; granted that La Salette may commemorate 
an imposture, Lourdes and Paray-le-Monial cases of 
hysteria, — the faith of the pilgrims, misplaced though 
it has been, has made them whole. If then we find 
that in our daily experience there are forces which we 
cannot as yet accurately define, and influences which 
we are unable to explain ; if there are occasionally 
departures from the normal and occurrences of the 
abnormal, or (in popular language) from the realm 
of the natural into that of the supernatural,* — the 
a priori incredibility of so-called miracles as viola- 
tions of the laws of nature, which to some minds is 
almost axiomatic, seems to me to disappear, and the 
whole question to resolve itself into one of evidence. 

"But," it may be said, " does not this make it difficult, 
if not impossible, to refuse credence to a host of wild 
stories of witchcraft and demonology, to commit us 
to the acceptance of numerous ecclesiastical miracles, 
no better, and sometimes even less edifying, than fairy 
tales ? " No more, I think, than the belief that some 
banknotes are genuine would compel us to accept 
every forgery. Indeed the presentation of the spurious 
is to some extent evidence for the existence of a 
real. In every case the evidence for a miracle must 
be strictly scrutinised ; and in doing this, not only 
must the testimony for the event itself be carefully 
weighed, but also its whole environment (if the term 
may be used) : the characters of the agents, active and 

* Or, as I should prefer to say, the supranatural ; for the other term 
seems (by popular use) to exclude over-much the idea of law and to imply 
arbitrariness. 



Nature and Miracle. 309 

passive, and of the witnesses ; its opportuneness or 
significance ; in short, its place, relative and actual, in 
history. In other words, we are always justified in 
regarding the account of a miracle with scepticism 
(using that word in its strict sense), and this should 
be the greater the more it approaches to a merely 
thaumaturgic act. I may prefer natural explanations 
for many so-called miracles, such as the blood-spots on 
the coffer containing presumed relics, notwithstanding 
"the calm and objective narrative of Eginhard" ;* I may 
decline to believe others, such as the use of a sunbeam 
for a cloak-peg, or even cases of levitation, whether of 
mediaeval saint or of modern medium ; and yet I may 
think it credible that at certain crises in this world's 
history, when a great forward step in its education was 
made, the energy or the power which is at the back of 
the cosmos, and has called it into being and alone 
sustains it — the God of the theist — does act with more 
than usual intensity, by ways and in accordance with 
laws of which commonly we have not any experience. 
So far from finding any a priori incredibility in a miracle 
under circumstances like these, I should rather expect 
it, because they are not those of every-day experience, 
because force or energy is operating with more than 
wonted intensity or to an exceptional degree. If I 
admit the possibility of a revelation, I admit by 
implication that of a miracle, for the former is not a 
matter of ordinary experience, and implies the action 

* The words of the late Professor Huxley. For a fuller account of. 
this case see a sermon by the author in Old Truths in Modern Lights^ 
p. 218. 



310 The Faith of Centuries. 

of the Divine Spirit on the material organism. The 
wise policy, as it seems to me, in view of our rapidly 
widening horizon in science, and our extremely 
imperfect knowledge of the causes to which even 
ordinary phenomena are due, is to set no arbitrary 
limits to the region of possibilities, and, while we 
maintain a somewhat sceptical attitude in regard to 
alleged miracles, not to refuse credence when the 
evidence appears satisfactory, and especially when the 
occasion seems to afford a dignus vindice nodus. 

T. G. BONNEY. 



XV 

Gbe IRinafcom of Ibeavem 

THE Church of Christ, in its ideal sense, is the 
aggregate of all true believers, past, present, 
and to come, united in Him, their Head. In its 
original sense it is the eiacXr)<Tia y the whole number 
of those who are truly " called out " ; in its strict 
meaning it refers to persons rather than to ideas 
or things. 

In its historical sense the Church of Christ is the 
Holy Catholic Church on earth, embracing not only 
true but also imperfect and insincere adherents, and 
holy generally in its aims and purposes. Of the 
Holy Catholic Church on earth different definitions 
would be given, and with these it is not to the 
purpose here to be concerned. It is sufficient in 
the present connection to have a clear notion of 
the fact that the ideal Church has an earthly mani- 
festation, containing all its professed adherents who 
are alive, and that, although God knows who are its 
true members, the true and untrue are to a large 
extent indistinguishable to their contemporaries. 

The Kingdom of Heaven is rather the system or 
311 



312 The Faith of Centuries. 

regime^ the circle of ideas and principles, which Christ 
came to reveal and establish for the guidance and 
regulation of His Church. Sometimes the Church 
and the Kingdom may seem almost identical; but 
the language about the Kingdom, taken strictly, 
generally refers to such ideas, principles, truths ; the 
language about the Church usually to the collection 
of persons. 

This will be seen by examining one of the 
characteristic passages about the Kingdom, St. Luke 
xvii. 20, 21 : — 

" And when He was demanded of the Pharisees, 
when the Kingdom of God should come, He answered 
them and said, 'The Kingdom of God cometh not 
with observation : neither shall they say, Lo here ! 
or, Lo there ! for, behold, the Kingdom of God is 
within you/ " 

There are two different renderings of the last 
expression. One has the authority of St. Chrysostom, 
Theophylact, and others, and is given both in the 
old Authorised English Version and the Revised. It 
is to the effect that the Kingdom is in the hearts 
and minds of its subjects, a spiritual principle. The 
other has the authority of some great modern 
scholars, Beza, Grotius, Wolf, Bengel, and Meyer, 
and runs, " The Kingdom of God is in the midst 
of you." They are decided in this opinion by the 
fact that our Lord was speaking to the Pharisees, 
in whose hearts nothing certainly found less place 
than the ideal Kingdom which He was preaching. 
This second translation, which is perhaps more in 



The Kingdom of Heaven. 313 

accordance with the original usage of the Greek, would 
mean, " Men will not be able to point definitely to 
the Kingdom of God, and to say, ' Here it is/ or, 
'There it is.' The Kingdom comes silently and 
unobserved ; so silently, so unobserved, that it is 
founded, and growing, and bearing fruit already, 
right in the very midst of you, and yet you neither 
see it, nor know it, nor are influenced by its 
presence." 

Whether we follow the translation of St. Chrysostom 
or that of Beza, it does not much matter. The point 
is that the Kingdom comes unnoticed, that it cannot 
be recognised or observed by mere outward tokens. 
It cannot be seen with the eye, or grasped with the 
hand, or measured by a map, or tested by a book of 
statistics. It is spiritual : " My Kingdom is not of 
this world " ; not one founded and conditioned in 
present material circumstances. It does not depend 
on earthly sanctions, precautions, or arrangements. 
It is a spiritual institution, capable of embracing all 
the human intelligences which it influences, the only 
Head of which is God. In another place our Lord 
follows the same idea by describing the Kingdom 
of Heaven as leaven, or yeast, hid in three measures 
of meal, working secretly and unobserved till the 
whole was leavened. Or again, it is as if a man 
should cast seed into the ground, and should sleep 
and rise, night and day, and the seed should spring 
and grow up, he knows not how. Man cannot 
measure or limit it ; it is the work of the Divine 
Spirit Himself, which is as the wind blowing where 



314 The Faith of Centuries. 

it listeth, unseen, untracked, unfettered, but felt in 
its results. 

This was the first great message of our Lord : 
" From that time," from the beginning of His 
ministry, after the Temptation, "Jesus began to 
preach, and to say, ' Repent : for the Kingdom of 
Heaven is at hand/ " It had been foretold by His 
forerunner, the famous preacher of righteousness, in 
the wilderness, in the same words : " Repent ye : 
for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." It was to 
be the burden of the preaching of His first twelve 
disciples : " As ye go, preach, saying, ' The Kingdom 
of Heaven is at hand/ " A new state, a new con- 
dition, was to be proclaimed and established among 
men. The old, formal, external theocracy, with its 
kings, its hierarchy, its material sacrifices, its oracles 
and its prophets, had become obsolete in God's 
purpose, and was done away. The spiritual reality 
which it had foreshadowed had at last arrived. A new 
glad principle was revealed which should profoundly 
affect every individual soul that should receive it. 
God was to be realised as King, in a truer and 
deeper sense than ever before. Christ, His Divine 
Son, was the visible expression of His sovereignty. 
All who accepted His message were to be a holy 
nation, a special people, a royal priesthood. They 
were to have new truths in their hearts, they were to 
move in a new circle of ideas, the most important of 
all their relations was that which was brought about 
by the new regime. 

The first effect of this revelation was to bring men 



The Kingdom of Heaven. 315 

straight back in front of the reality of the unseen 
God, and to remind them of their personal, indivi- 
dual relation to His Being.* He is no abstract idea, 
but in a most true and overwhelmingly important 
sense " Our Father." He in whom we live and move 
and have our existence, in whom all things consist, 
the awful, omnipresent Creator, Ruler and Upholder 
of all things, the Self-existent, the Unlimited, the 
Beginning and the End, is actually, truly, effectively, 
" Our Father," knowing all the things we have need 
of before we ask Him, numbering actually all the hairs 
of our head, and not even allowing a sparrow to fall 
to the ground without His knowledge. His cognisance 
of things is equally real in every minutest spot of 
His unending universe, and He is as much present 
with every individual as He is in the noblest sun in 
the most glorious part of the heavens. He is revealed 
to us as the perfection of everything : Love, Light, 
Knowledge, Truth, Power, Beauty, Goodness, Justice, 
Mercy. He concentrates in Himself everything that 
is of any worth at all ; or rather everything that is of 
value derives its value from His omnipresent nature. 
From Him alone comes every good and perfect 
gift. Man was created in His image, whether the 
act of creation was instantaneous or progressive. 
Man's true destiny was to be like the Divine Spirit 
that produced him. It was the intention of the 
Creator that man should be, in his small degree, 
perfect as He is perfect. Fallen low as man is, it is 

* In this connection I venture to recommend the remarkable 
chapters in Ecce Homo on the Kingdom of God. 



316 The Faith of Centuries. 

still possible to restore or revive his likeness to his 
Father in heaven, if he will only realise the actuality 
of the Kingdom of Heaven, if only his feeble, blind, 
and erring will can be prevailed on to co-operate with 
the Divine. The more nearly the soul can be brought 
into direct relation with the Divine Source of all 
happiness, so much the better will be its condition. 

The Kingdom of Heaven had a share in our Lord's 
teaching quite disproportionate to the casual refer- 
ences which we make to it now. It was to proclaim 
the joyous message of the new Kingdom on earth 
that He came. " He went throughout every city and 
village proclaiming the glad tidings of the Kingdom 
of God." Unless we realise this truth, we cannot be 
very genuine Christians. And we do not realise it 
enough. In our own eyes we are still mainly and 
chiefly Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irish, Americans, 
Frenchmen, Germans ; men of business, with our 
own share, larger or smaller, in the national life ; 
men, it may be, with some religious principles and 
religious duties, which we sometimes endeavour, with 
more or less success, to acknowledge and fulfil. But 
when we have effectively joined Christ heart and 
soul, then this order is reversed. We have become 
in a predominant and absorbing sense subjects of 
the Kingdom of God. That is our first and primary 
interest. We are citizens of a state which exists in 
its pure condition in heaven, which is brought down 
to earth for the redemption of mankind, and which is 
complete in heaven again. Our earthly allegiances, 
loyalties, ties, and relationships are important, and 



The Kingdom of Heaven. 317 

must be recognised ; but compared with this new 
dignity and obedience they retire quietly and silently 
into a less conspicuous place. The one great wish 
of the sincere Christian's heart is that God's Kingdom 
of perfectness and blissfulness may be realised ever 
more completely and truly, until it overspreads the 
whole earth. " Thy Kingdom come." 

We have always to remember that this ideal was 
the true vision of the future which Christ saw and 
proclaimed. There was to be a Kingdom of Righteous- 
ness on earth, formed by individual union with God 
through Himself, not interfering with the states and 
kingdoms of the world, nor superseding them, but 
permeating and transforming them through their 
members. He was Himself to be the eternal King, 
the expression to men of the one Divine Being, and 
drawing all men to Himself by the perfection of His 
love in the redemption of the world. His subjects 
would at first be few, mean, and poor. They would 
not be able to understand Him thoroughly ; they 
would but be able to witness to the facts of His life 
and teaching, to secure them as the priceless heritage 
of mankind for ever, and to repeat His message. But 
gradually the Kingdom would extend. Men of 
goodwill would be attracted by the revelation of 
perfection and beauty which they would find in 
Christ's life and character, would repent of the 
contrast which their own lives presented, and would 
believe and obey. It has been finely said that " we 
want a test which shall admit all who have it in them 
to be good, whether their good qualities be trained 



318 The Faith of Centuries. 

or no. Such a test is found in FAITH. He who, 
when goodness is impressively put before him, exhibits 
an instinctive loyalty to it, starts forward to take its 
side, trusts himself to it, such a man has faith, and 
the root of the matter is in such a man. . . . He may 
be rude in thought and character, but he will un- 
consciously gravitate towards what is right. Other 
virtues can scarcely thrive without a fine natural 
organisation, and a happy training. But the most 
neglected and ungifted of men may make a beginning 
with faith. Other virtues want civilisation, a certain 
amount of knowledge, a few books ; but in half-brutal 
countenances faith will light up a glimmer of noble- 
ness. The savage, who can do little else, can wonder, 
and worship, and enthusiastically obey. He who 
cannot know what is right can know that somebody 
else knows, he who has no law may yet have a 
master, he who is incapable of justice may be capable 
of fidelity, he who understands little may yet have 
his sins forgiven because he loves much." * He can 
hold on to the reconciling love of Christ, and be 
healed as the Hebrew in the wilderness. 

That is man's first step in relation to the Kingdom 
of Heaven : recognition of the Divine Perfection in 
Christ, and the desire to be loyal to His Person ; in a 
word, Faith. 

The next step is Repentance. " From that time 
Jesus began to preach, and to say, ' Repent : for the 
Kingdom of Heaven is at hand/" We know well 
that the natural man loves not the things of God. 

* Ecce Homo. 



The Kingdom of Heaven. 319 

Even men of goodwill, in their natural state, find 
pleasure in sin, self-indulgence, pomps, vanities, follies, 
ambitions, deceits, and corruptions. From all this he 
who would be a citizen of the Kingdom must turn 
away with dislike and humiliation. He has to be 
changed ; and Christ the King, through the Divine 
Omnipresent Spirit, not only shows him what he is 
to be like, and what to avoid, but gives him the 
actual power of renovation. His Kingdom is pre- 
eminently a Kingdom of Grace. 

It is because the change on truly entering the 
Kingdom is so great that it is described as a New 
Birth. "Except a man be born again, he cannot 
enter into the Kingdom of God." (The Kingdom ol 
God and the Kingdom of Heaven are expressions 
for the same great truth.) He cannot gaily profess 
allegiance to Christ and remain as he was before. 
He has to be renewed in .the spirit of his mind, to 
have a new heart, new affections, an altered will, a 
love of what is good, a hatred of what is evil. That 
can only be by the human will consenting to the 
Divine Spirit, co-operating with it, submitting to it, 
being daily led by its power. 

Such a genuine faith, such a true change, will be 
followed by Obedience as necessarily as the sun 
is followed by light. That is another successive 
characteristic of citizenship in the Kingdom. And 
there are two great primary tests of obedience. One 
is the formal act of entering the Society (the Church), 
which results from the introduction of the Kingdom 
of Heaven among men, and of profession of allegiance, 



320 The Faith of Centuries. 

by submitting to the symbolical act of cleansing in 
water. That may be either done for the postulant by 
the faith of his parents and the congregation when he 
is yet an unconscious child, or it may be (as in the 
case of direct converts) at his own request when he is 
a convinced Christian. In either case the act must 
be accompanied by faith. Without such a definite 
symbol and act there could be no definite entrance. 
Without such a sealing of the covenant between God 
and man on the part of man there would be, as far 
as we can see, no confirmation of the promise, no 
pledge of adoption, no guarantee of the new birth. 
And the other test of obedience is the solemn memorial 
partaking of the emblematic Bread and Wine, in the 
pleading of the great Sacrifice of Calvary ; hallowed 
elements, which the Lord of Life chose as the pledges 
of His grace, tokens of His Divine love, reminders of 
His awful mediatorial act, by which He took away 
the guilt of the world, and reconciled man to God, 
channels of His grace in response to the earnestness 
of faith. These are the two principal tests of obedi- 
ence in Time and Space, in the Society that is the 
expression of the Kingdom, without which loyalty, 
allegiance, and reality could not be maintained. 

The laws, or rather principles, of the Kingdom are 
many ; as many as the different points in the example, 
character, and teaching of Christ the King. Among 
them are the following : — 

i. The law of Liberty : " If the Son shall make you 
free, ye shall be free indeed." There is a liberty of 
the mind which tyrants cannot touch ; and human 



The Kingdom of Heaven. 321 

institutions, so far as they are enlightened by the 
truths of the Kingdom of Heaven, will endeavour to 
secure this liberty in their smallest details. 

2. The law of Equality : " Be not ye called Rabbi : 
for one is your Master, even Christ." There was 
the first idea of the cure of differences of human 
conditions : the voluntary self-restraint from in- 
sisting on social advantages. But the citizens of 
the Kingdom have not sufficiently as yet laid this 
to heart. 

3. The law of Fraternity, "All ye are brethren." 
The old idea of privileged races, tribes, classes, 
individuals, is entirely swept away. The ideal is 
universal brotherhood among the sons of God. 

4. The golden rule of Loving our Neighbour as Our- 
selves : " Love is the fulfilling of the Law." Selfish- 
ness, the motive on which the world is calculated to 
act, is abolished. There is an enlightened, ideal self- 
love, else existence would be impossible ; but it must 
regard everybody else with whom it is brought in 
contact with at least equal interest : in many things, 
where selfishness would otherwise display itself, the 
interest must be even greater. 

5. The law of Conquering Opponents by Kindness and 
Affection : " I say unto you, * Love your enemies.' " 
This is a still more sublime ideal ; a lesson harder to 
learn and to practise, and even more penetrating in 
its effects on the life of the world. 

6. The law of constant : , energetic ) absorbingly active 
Philanthropy : " Do good and lend, hoping for nothing 
again " ; " Son, go work to-day in My vineyard." 

21 



322 The Faith of Centuries. 

The King's own example was one of ceaseless, un- 
wearied beneficence : " He went about doing good." 
Life is too short to do all the good to which each 
knightly citizen is called : " The night cometh, when 
no man can work." 

7. The law of Progress : " When ye have done all 
those things which are commanded you, say, ' We are 
unprofitable servants : we have done that which was 
our duty to do ' " ; "I count not myself to have 
apprehended " ; "I press toward the mark of the 
prize of my high calling " ; " Be ye perfect" ; " Pro- 
voking one another unto love, and unto good works." 
Contentment with our own performance in anything 
which we are called on to do is impossible ; there is 
always something to be done better, higher, truer, 
more exemplary. 

8. The law of Unselfishness : "If any man will 
come after Me, let him deny himself" (treat himself 
as absorbed in Christ), " and take up his cross daily " 
(as if he too were ready to die on Calvary), " and 
follow Me." The only true happiness is when each 
seeks the other's good ; the only true welfare for 
mankind is when all are thinking of the advantage of 
the rest rather than their own. 

9. The law of the Highest Good of our Neighbour and 
of Humanity \ " Let all things be done to edifying" ; 
" Whether ye eat or drink, or whatever ye do, do all 
to the glory of God." In accordance with this law 
the Christian is not merely content to do what is 
permissible, but must always aim, in small things as 
well as in great, in doing what is best. 



The Kingdom of Heaven. 323 

10. The law of Forgiveness : " If ye forgive not 
men their trespasses, neither will your Heavenly 
Father forgive you." This is the condition attached 
by His Divine Will to His pardon of us : we must 
show our sincerity by forgiving others, or being ready 
to be reconciled to them if they will permit it. It is 
a law which puts an end to feuds, wars, and every 
form of vindictiveness. Those who bear malice in 
their hearts are so far disloyal members of the King- 
dom, if members at all. 

11. The law of Indignation-. "Woe unto you, 
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! " " Thou wicked 
and slothful servant ! I forgave thee . . . shouldest 
thou not also have forgiven ? " The true Christian 
can have no sympathy with wrong-doing, or with 
wrong-doers as such. A healthy moral indignation 
against every form of evil is an essential characteristic 
of the service of the Kingdom. 

12. The law of Purity : "If thy right eye cause 
thee to stumble, if thy right hand, pluck it out, cut 
it off, and cast it from thee." Purity must not be 
merely a matter of decorum ; it must penetrate the 
whole being, and rule the heart and thought. 

13. The law of Truthfulness : " Let your communi- 
cation be ' Yea, yea/ " This strikes at the root of all 
duplicity, subterfuge, chicanery, concealment, decep- 
tion, and intrigue. The atmosphere of the Kingdom 
of Heaven is that of the Palace of Truth. The 
language of its citizens needs not to be met with 
suspicion and watchfulness. They mean what they 
say, and say what they mean. 



324 The Faith of Centuries. 

14. The law of Sincerity : " Let not thy right hand 
know what thy left hand doeth." The only aim of 
the citizen of the Kingdom in all his doings will be 
the glory of God and the good of man. All personal 
advantage and advancement will be rigorously dis- 
carded. His aim will be one, simple and straight. 
From the mixed motives of the world he will con- 
tinuously struggle to be free. 

15. The law of Prayer : " Ask, and ye shall receive." 
The ordinary blessings of life the Almighty Being 
showers alike on the good and the evil, the loyal 
and the unthankful. To the gift of all His higher 
and better blessings He has necessarily annexed the 
conditions of desire and receptivity on the part of 
the recipient. Those who wish for growth and 
progress in spiritual life and in daily happiness must 
believe that God exists, that He is omnipotent, that 
He has the love of a Father for His children, and 
that he can and will bestow the greatest blessings on 
those who have the faith, sincerity, and earnestness 
to ask for the boon. 

16. The law of Contentment : " Seek ye first the 
Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these 
things shall be added unto you." As long as the 
Christian has the true grip on the real meaning of 
life, and the glory of the future, and the inestimable 
dignity of fellowship with the Father and the Son, 
riches and poverty are to him indifferent. As long 
as he does his duty in humble dependence on the 
Ruler of all things, he is sure to have enough of the 
necessaries and comforts of life. Worldly distinctions, 



The Kingdom of Heaven. 325 

honours, and emoluments may be used to a good 
purpose, but to many they are merely snares, which 
keep them from realising the spiritual glories and 
delights of the ideal Kingdom of Heaven. 

17. The law of Uncensoriousness : " Judge not, that 
ye be not judged." This is a parallel to the law 
of Forgiveness ; the Almighty requires a condition of 
our own hearts corresponding to the blessing which 
we desire from Him. We cannot see the innermost 
heart, or discriminate the mixture of motives, or 
weigh the influence of antecedent circumstances. We 
are not permitted to judge and to censure. Where 
wrong-doing is flagrant and obvious, we are called to 
repudiate it with earnestness and sincerity ; but the 
habit of mind which delights in perpetually passing- 
others under review, and criticising their actions and 
sayings, and depreciating their motives, is a blind 
and blundering usurpation of the prerogative of the 
Almighty, and is alien to the temper of the Kingdom. 

1 8. The law of Earnestness : " The Kingdom of 
Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by 
storm " ; " Enter ye in by the strait gate ... for few 
there be that find it." No loitering, half-hearted 
movement towards God and His realm will be 
effective ; the world will be too strong for the un- 
decided. Decision is needed, and purpose, and 
struggle, and zeal. The King Himself was held by 
His earthly relatives to be beside Himself. 

All these, and a multitude of other principles and 
characteristics, the true citizen of the Kingdom will 
find reproduced in himself, if he surrenders himself 



326 The Faith of Centuries. 

consciously and without reserve to the guidance of 
the Spirit of God. 

How different are its excellent qualities, the objects 
of admiration and culture, from those of the world ! 
Blessed are they who feel themselves spiritually 
needy. Blessed are they who mourn for their sins 
and imperfections, and are not content with them- 
selves as they are. Blessed are the gentle, reasonable, 
and good-tempered in disposition and demeanour. 
Blessed are they who are so eager for righteousness, 
for the godly, just, and sober life, that they feel 
positive hunger and thirst for its realisation. Blessed 
are the merciful in act, judgment, and sympathy. 
Blessed are they who are not merely correct and 
undefiled in language, but in thought and heart. 
Blessed are they who do their utmost to keep peace 
amongst persons, families, communities, churches, 
and nations. Blessed are they to whom personal 
rectitude, loyalty to God, and goodness of life are so 
real and predominant that they will rather submit to 
persecution and death than deflect from the Divine 
standard. The fruit of the Spirit is Love, Joy, 
Peace, Long-suffering, Gentleness, Goodness, Meek- 
ness, Temperance. These are the characteristics 
which the citizen of the Kingdom must expect to find 
growing in himself, if he is sincere in his allegiance. 

And the subjects of the thoughts and conversation 
of God's people are not far to seek. The things that 
are true : such are the facts of Revelation and the 
glories of Science. The things that are venerable : 
such are the teachings of History. The things that 



The Kingdom of Heaven. 327 

are pure : the study of the Ideal in every phase of 
life. The things that are lovely : the meditations of 
devotion, the elevation of Human Character, the 
triumphs of genuine, lofty, and divinely inspired Art 
in all its branches. The things that are of good 
report : the heroic in Conduct and Example. And 
to sum up : all that is Virtuous, all that is Praise- 
worthy, all that enkindles the Sympathy of noble 
minds. 

There is one condition of entering the Kingdom 
(in the true sense of the phrase) which is too often 
neglected. The men of the City of God cannot be 
haughty, domineering, wilful, masterful : they are to 
exhibit the simplicity, docility, and humility of little 
children. When the King was asked, " Who is the 
greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven ? " He answered, 
" Except ye be converted, and become as little 
children, ye shall not enter therein. . . . Whosoever 
shall humble himself as this little child, the same 
is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven." " Suffer the 
little children," He said on another occasion, " to come 
unto Me : for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." 
Happy the citizen who from his baptism is enabled 
to grow into the simple summary of Christian duty: 
to love his neighbour as himself; to do to all men as 
he would they should do to him ; to love, honour, 
and succour his father and mother ; to obey the 
sovereign power and all in lawful authority ; to submit 
to all due governors, teachers, spiritual pastors, and 
masters ; to order himself lowly and reverently to 
all his betters ; to hurt nobody by word or deed ; 



328 The Faith of Centuries. 

to be true and just in all his dealing ; to bear no 
malice nor hatred in his heart ; to keep his hands 
from all dishonesty, and his tongue from evil-speaking, 
lying, and slandering ; to keep his body in tem- 
perance and chastity ; not to covet nor desire other 
men's goods ; but to learn and labour truly to get his 
own living, and to do his duty in that state of life 
unto which it shall please God to call him ! Happy 
he who, if through some moral neglect or misfortune 
he has failed to grow up a true and genuine Christian, 
is reminded of his baptismal allegiance by some 
merciful interposition of the Holy Spirit, becomes 
sincerely changed, and turns to God as a little child ! 
Our Lord occasionally described the Kingdom of 
Heaven as containing, like the Church which is its 
aspect as an aggregation of adherents, both real and 
counterfeit members. It is like the field which had 
both tares and wheat. It is like the net which held 
both bad and good fish. Here, as I said, the King- 
dom of Heaven and the Church seem nearly identical. 
But the distinction must still be remembered that in 
His general employment of the phrase He indicates 
rather the principles and truths which He came to 
reveal and establish, while the Church is a word which 
etymologically indicates the aggregate of individuals. 
Our Lord rarely uses the word Church ; but after His 
ascension " the Body called out " came into more 
frequent employment, as the Church, already founded, 
became formed and ordered. From the Kingdom of 
Heaven in its ideal sense all wilful evil-doers neces- 
sarily exclude themselves. " Know ye not," says 



The Kingdom of Heaven. 329 

St. Paul to some make-believe official Christians, 
" that the unrighteous shall not inherit the Kingdom 
of God ? Be not deceived : neither fornicators, nor 
idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor thieves, 
nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall 
inherit the Kingdom of God." And to the Galatians, 
adding to that list the vices of hatred, strife, rivalry 
wrath, party spirit, divisions, bigotries, envyings, 
he says with solemn iteration, " Of the which I tell 
you before, as I have also told you in time past, 
that they which do such things shall not inherit the 
Kingdom of God." And our Lord, using the phrase 
in the same ideal and exclusive sense, gave the 
additional warning that it was with great difficulty 
that a rich man, trusting in his wealth and in all the 
material comfort, contentment, self-satisfaction, enjoy- 
ment, and power that it brought him, should enter 
into that ideal nationality ; yes, it was easier for a 
camel to go through the eye of a needle than for 
a rich man, relying on his possessions, to become 
a citizen of the heavenly state. It is not a material 
asset. " Flesh and blood," said St. Paul, " cannot 
inherit the Kingdom of Heaven." 

Such is the account of the Kingdom of Heaven 
given in the New Testament, as founded and revealed 
on earth in the Lord Jesus Christ. Many things 
more might be said about it. It necessitated, as 
we have seen, a Society of living men, the Church, 
authority over which was first entrusted to St. Peter 
on behalf of the other Apostles as their spokesman, 
afterwards to the disciples at large and generally, 



330 The Faith of Centuries. 

and then again to the eleven Apostles. No society 
of men could exist without rules and ministerial 
provisions. Happy would it have been for the 
Christian Church if it could always have lived by 
the same rule, and been of the same mind in its 
organisation. Into the vast questions connected 
with the idea of the Christian Church I am precluded 
by the limits of the subject from entering on the 
present occasion. No such difficulties, happily, attend 
the conception of the Kingdom of Heaven, as the 
ideal set of moral and religious principles and truths 
revealed by Christ, to be realised on earth by His 
Church r " The Kingdom of God cometh not with 
observation : neither shall they say, ( Lo here ! ' or, 
' Lo there ! ' for, behold, the Kingdom of God is 
within you." 

It is the continual prayer of the Church that she 
may realise and cultivate the truths and ideals of 
the Kingdom of God. She prays that the Divine 
Majesty " would inspire continually the Universal 
Church with the spirit of truth, unity, and concord ; 
and that all they that do confess His Holy Name 
may agree in the truth of His Holy Word, and live 
in unity and godly love." And again she utters her 
supplications for " the good estate of the Catholic 
Church ; that it may be so guided and governed by 
God's good Spirit, that all who profess and call 
themselves Christians may be led into the way of 
truth, and hold the faith in unity of spirit, in the 
bond of peace, and in righteousness of life." 

How far the Church has been enabled to see the 



The Kingdom of Heaven. 331 

results of her prayer, it would be interesting, if there 
were space, to inquire. To speak generally, " The 
effects of the manifestation of Jesus," it has been well 
said, " far transcend all merely human capacity and 
power. The history of Christianity, with its countless 
fruits of a higher and purer life of truth and love than 
was ever known before, or is known now, outside of 
its influence, is a continuous commentary on the life 
of Christ " (a continuous demonstration of the vitality 
and effectiveness of the Kingdom of Heaven), " and 
testifies on every page to the inspiration of His holy 
example. His power is felt on every Lord's Day 
from a thousand thousand pulpits, in the palaces of 
kings and the huts of beggars, in universities and 
colleges, in every school where the Sermon on the 
Mount is read ; in prisons, in almshouses, in orphan 
asylums, as well as in happy homes ; in learned works 
and simple tracts in endless succession. 

" And there is no sign that His power is waning. 
His kingdom is more widely spread than ever before, 
and has the fairest prospect of final triumph in all the 
earth. Napoleon at St. Helena is reported to have 
been struck with the reflection that millions are now 
ready to die for the crucified Nazarene, who founded 
a spiritual empire by love, while no one would die 
for Alexander, or Caesar, or himself, who founded 
temporal empires by force. He saw in this contrast 
a convincing argument for the Divinity of Christ, 
saying, c I know men, and I tell you Christ was not a 
man. Everything about Christ astonishes me. His 
spirit overwhelms and confounds me. There is no 



332 The Faith of Centuries. 

comparison between Him and any other being. He 
stands single and alone/ And Goethe, another com- 
manding genius, of very different character, but 
equally above suspicion of partiality for religion, 
looking in the last years of his life over the vast field 
of history, was constrained to confess that 'if ever 
the Divine appeared on earth, it was in the Person 
of Christ ' ; and that ' the human mind, how far it 
may advance in every other department, will never 
transcend the height and moral culture of Christianity 
as it shines and glows in the Gospels.' 

" Truly Jesus Christ " (the Revealer and Founder 
of the Kingdom of Heaven), " the Christ of history, 
the risen Christ, the Divine-human Christ, is the most 
real, the most certain, the most blessed of all facts. 
And this fact is an ever-present and growing power 
which pervades the Church and conquers the world, 
and is its own best evidence, as the sun shining in the 
heavens. This fact is the only solution of the terrible 
mystery of sin and death, the only inspiration to a 
holy life of love to God and man, the only guide to 
happiness and peace. Systems of human wisdom 
will come and go, earthly kingdoms and empires will 
rise and fall, but for all time to come Christ will 
remain ' the Way, the Truth, and the Life.' " * 

William Sinclair. 

* Schaff, History of the Christian Church. 



XVI. 

Ibeaveru 

WHAT is Heaven? 
That is the question which the human 
heart, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, has 
asked unceasingly. It is a question to which the 
Catholic Church can give a partial, though as yet 
necessarily an incomplete, answer. But it is manifest 
that for her answer the Church must depend upon 
the revelation of her Divine Founder Himself. For 
Heaven lies beyond the range of human intuitions 
or speculations or discoveries. " No man hath seen 
God at any time " ; and no man hath seen Heaven. 
Something indeed — some faint evidence of immor- 
tality — it is possible to infer from the nature of the 
human soul, as Plato has done in the dialogue called 
PhcedO) or Wordsworth in his famous Ode, though 
the latter is perhaps more justly regarded as a plea 
for the Divine affinity than for the immortality of the 
soul ; but the character or conditions of the heavenly 
state, its relation to the present life, its compensatory 
power, its eternity, its spirituality— all this, and much 
beside, if it is known at all, can be known only by 

333 



334 The Faith of Centuries. 

the personal attestation of Jesus Christ. For His 
first followers, the authors of the New Testament, 
even those who, as St. Paul and St. John, enjoyed 
unique spiritual experiences, derived their apprehen- 
sion of the heavenly state from or through Him. 

Of the fact of Heaven Natural Religion can perhaps 
afford some evidence ; but Revealed Religion alone 
can exhibit its character. 

In thinking of Heaven, then, we turn to the words 
of Jesus Christ. 

And here it is important to remark that Jesus 
Christ, when He spoke of Heaven, was 'careful to 
use such language as is figurative or suggestive or 
analogical. He could not indeed have spoken 
otherwise. It is impossible in human words to give 
an exact account of a superhuman or supernatural 
existence. Yet human words must be employed, or 
none at all. There is on earth no celestial language. 
He who speaks to men,' though He be Divine, must 
avail Himself of such means as will convey to His 
audience, not a perfect or precise idea of His meaning, 
but the best idea which the audience is capable of 
apprehending. And while it is true that an idea, 
if so conceived, will be inadequate, and may easily 
be misrepresented and misunderstood, there exists 
no other way of conveying at all to men an idea 
of things transcending human experience. But 
because this difficulty exists, and can never cease 
to exist, it is an error to press the details of para- 
bolical language into a formal theological system, 
an error to suppose that each noun or adjective in a 



} 
I 

I ! 

Heaven, h \ 335 

passage relating to the unseen world must represent 
a precise spiritual verity. In no aspect of Divine 
teaching is caution so necessary to an interpreter, and 
in none, alas! has it been so frequently forgotten, as 
in the revelation concerning the invisible world. 

The interpretation of Holy Scripture demands a 
rational and a sympathetic spirit. It demands a 
sense of perspective, a sense of proportion — I might 
add, a sense of poetry. The literalism which treats 
all things as true and equally true, all things as 
spiritually valuable and of equal value,* which applies 
the same method to Genesis and to the Books of the 
Kings and to Isaiah, to the Gospels, to the Epistles 
of St. Paiil, and to the Apocalypse, is so short-sighted 
and narrow-minded that it must be untrue. Whatever 
words of our Lord relate to Heaven need to be 
accepted under the limiting condition that " eye hath 
not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the 
heart of man," the things of Heaven ; and that the 
revelation of them is not literal, but spiritual. For 
who will imagine that such phrases as " paradise," or 
" Abraham's bosom," or the " many mansions," or the 
"right hand" and the "left" of the Lord in His 
glory, are other than metaphorical expressions ? Or, 
to go beyond our Lord's own words, who will imagine 
that St. Paul's " third heaven " — an expression bor- 
rowed from the Jewish theology — is to be taken as 
mathematically correct, or that the "harps" and 
" vials full of odours " of St. John's vision are to be 
taken as so many matters of fact ? Nay, if the literal 
exegesis of inspired poetry is to have its way, the 



336 The Faith of Centuries. 

dimensions and proportions of the New Jerusalem are 
accurately given in the twenty-first chapter of the 
Apocalypse : " The city lieth four-square, and the 
length is as large as the breadth : and he measured 
the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. 
The length and the breadth and the height of it 
are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, an 
hundred and forty and four cubits." Who does not 
see that the perfect cube is not a literal but a typical 
figure? It is a sign, not of mensuration, but of 
perfection. 

It must be admitted that the exegetical method 
which is here advocated does not diminish the 
difficulty of interpreting Holy Scripture. But on the 
other hand there is reason to fear that theologians, 
in the natural desire of arriving at precise and specific 
truth, have often exceeded the warrant of Holy 
Scripture itself. Theology has been definite where 
inspiration has been vague. Fortunately the theo- 
logians have not agreed among themselves. It is 
not improbable that those of them who have been 
most logical, as Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, have 
wandered the farthest from the Gospel of Divine Love ; 
for logic, though it is an admirable instrument in its 
application to human things, seems to lose both its 
acuteness and its utility when it touches such things 
as are in their nature superhuman and Divine. For 
myself, I cannot hope — I do not desire — to formulate 
any plan of the heavenly life. I humbly trust in 
such light as Christ Himself sheds upon the great and 
solemn mystery. For while it is true that our Lord's 



Heaven. 337 

words respecting Heaven must be regarded as 
adumbrations of an inexpressible and inconceivable 
reality, it is not impossible to draw certain inferences 
from His teaching, and still more from His life. 

Thus He taught beyond doubt the existence of 
Heaven. Heaven was an axiom of His revelation. 
He did not prove it ; He took it for granted. It was 
essential to His Gospel. He could not have been 
what He was or have taught as He did except upon 
the hypothesis of a life surviving and transcending 
the limitations within which human life is passed 
upon the earth ; and that transcendent life is the life 
of Heaven. To Him, as to all who in the Christian 
ages have learnt the secret of the Gospel, the life of 
earth is the shadow, the life of Heaven is the sub- 
stance : the one is phenomenal and transient ; the 
other is real, enduring, absolute, true. Jesus Christ 
attested this life by His doctrine, but He attested it 
yet more forcibly by His character. For it is the 
prerogative of sanctity to create a belief in the 
spiritual or heavenly life. The soul or conscience of 
man repudiates the thought that it is with the good 
at the last as with the evil, and that death is the 
end of all. It claims instinctively the vindication of 
the Divine mercy and power in the spacious periods 
of eternity. The contemporaries and companions of 
Jesus Christ, when they penetrated to the truth of His 
personality, could not believe that His purpose would 
prove frustrate, or that His Divine life would cease 
after a few years, or that He would not ascend to 
His Father. And where He was, there might they 

22 



338 The Faith of Centuries. 

hope to be. They believed in Heaven because they 
believed in Him. 

Jesus Christ, then, taught the reality of Heaven. 
But not only so ; in His teaching He spoke of it with 
complete knowledge, with complete certainty. He 
professed and claimed to know all about Heaven. 
And this knowledge was His because of the unique 
relation in which He stood to His Father in Heaven. 
As being the Son of God, as having descended to 
earth from God, He could, if He would, afford to 
mankind a full revelation of the celestial city wherein 
God dwelt. " No man hath seen God at any time ; 
the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of 
the Father, He hath declared Him."* This is the 
substance of His revelation. It was because He 
knew what man could not know, because He stood 
to God in a relation in which no man had stood or 
could stand, that He came to declare the truth of 
Divine things, and among them of Heaven. Certainty 
is the note of all His teaching. He never offered an 
opinion ; whatever He said He said as a fact. And 
the same assurance as He displayed in regard to 
moral and spiritual laws, to the nature of God and the 
nature of man, He displayed in speaking of Heaven. 
He was as familiar with Heaven as any human being 
may be with the streets and edifices of the town of 
which he is a citizen ; and He knew it so well because 
it was His home. Whether it was His will or not to 
reveal the character of Heaven, He declared explicitly 
that it was within His power to reveal it. " In My 

* Tohn i. 18. 



Heaven. 339 

Father's house are many mansions : if it were not so, 
I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for 
you." * Here as elsewhere Jesus Christ taught with 
authority. 

It is remarkable, then, that, while asserting His 
complete and absolute knowledge of the heavenly 
life, our Lord should have observed in all His teach- 
ing so great a reticence and reserve in speaking of 
Heaven. Heaven was clearly one of the subjects 
upon which it was impossible for Him to tell as a man 
to men all that He knew. He refused to let Heaven 
and heavenly things appear, except within due limits, 
in the scope of His revelation. His reserve touching 
the unseen world was followed by the inheritors of His 
Gospel ; it is seen conspicuously in the narrative of the 
death and resurrection of Lazarus as contained in the 
Fourth Gospel. There is a manifest intention not to 
exaggerate the awfulness of the invisible world. It 
may be said of Jesus Christ that, while He laid a 
powerful emphasis upon the reality and significance 
of that world, He intended and desired it to be a 
hope, a solace, a motive to holiness in its effect upon 
mankind ; it was not His purpose that the revelation 
of that world, by its vivid intensity, should exercise a 
blinding or paralysing influence upon human action. 
And the experience of history has shown, as in parts 
of Europe about the year 1000 A.D., that, when the 
anticipation of this world's end as imminent has been 
overstrained, it has impoverished and impaired human 
energy. But the will of God is that we should prepare 

* John xiv. 2. 



340 The Faith of Centuries. 

ourselves in this life for the next, not that we should 
sacrifice this life and its interests and endeavours, as 
though they were practically worthless. 

Among the lessons of Christ's teaching upon 
Heaven, there are two which seem to stand out in 
relief. He taught that the enjoyment of the heavenly 
life depended upon character and conduct in this life. 
He taught too that the access to the heavenly life 
lay in the method and revelation of His own Gospel. 

It is not in man to merit Heaven. Man cannot 
claim God's highest boon. He possesses no desert 
in relation to His Maker. Sin still clings about 
human nature ; it cannot be shaken off. We are all 
suppliants for Divine mercy ; and if we win Heaven, 
we shall owe our felicity to the atoning blood of 
the Saviour. But the work done in this world, the 
character formed here, the cultivation of the spiritual 
faculty, are the conditions by which man is in his 
measure fitted for Heaven and qualified to enjoy the 
intuitions and devotions of the heavenly life. 

The doctrine of the Sheol or Hades as an inter- 
mediate state between the present life and the life 
of perfect bliss lies apart from the subject of this 
paper. For whether the transition from earth to 
Heaven be for human spirits an immediate or a 
purgatorial process, Heaven, as understood in the 
Christian Church, is undoubtedly the home of re- 
deemed, sanctified, and perfected spirits. And Holy 
Scripture explicitly declares that there is such a 
home, and that a man's conduct in this life is pro- 
foundly influential upon his happiness hereafter. 



Heaven. 341 

But bearing in mind what has been said — viz. 
that the language of our Lord and of His in- 
spired Apostles respecting Heaven is necessarily 
figurative or suggestive, as it relates to a life of 
which man possesses no experience — we may pro- 
ceed to consider both negatively and positively what 
may be not unjustly conceived to be the life of 
Heaven. 

Our Lord spoke of Heaven in the language of 
earth. He could not have spoken otherwise so as 
to be understood at all ; but His language lies open 
to misconception. It is necessary to put aside some 
earthly ideas which have obscured the heavenly 
vision. 

Thus the idea of place is not in itself proper to 
Heaven. It was natural that man should think and 
speak of Heaven as a place ; not less natural that he 
should think and speak of it as a place above his 
head. The contrast between the heaven above and 
the earth beneath was made inevitable by the circum- 
stances of life. Man looks upwards in admiration, 
downwards in contempt. Hell, then, was locally 
situated beneath his feet, as was Heaven in his 
conception over his head. But such a theory is 
a natural association of ideas ; it is not a scientific 
statement Just as the region of the dawn was in 
pagan creeds taken for the abode of happiness, and 
the region of the night for that of misery, so it was 
natural that human imagination, soaring upwards, 
should fancy itself to approach the Throne of God 
in Heaven, and that, as it penetrated downwards, it 



342 The Faith of Centuries, 

should fancy itself to descend to the region of the 
spirits sunk in endless nether gloom. Thus the 
Psalmist cries, " If I climb up into Heaven, Thou 
art there : if I go down to Hell, Thou art there also." * 
But no philosophical mind will mistake this imagery 
for sober scientific truth. 

Similarly the idea of time is not proper to Heaven. 
Time is a condition of material existence ; it is 
not a condition of immaterial existence. In the 
life of spirits, as in the life of Him who is Spirit, 
one day is as a thousand years and a thousand 
years as one day. It is true that Jesus Christ in 
speaking of Heaven habitually used the language 
of time as well as of place, and His use of this 
language was a necessity, as He could not speak 
to men of life except in such terms as were asso- 
ciated with life ; but none the less His language is a 
concession to human infirmity, and it would be no less 
wrong to conceive of Heaven as an everlasting period 
than to conceive of it as a supernal region. Ageless 
time (if it may be so called) is Heaven's period. 
Even in this life within human experience there are 
moments when the soul transcends, or seems to 
transcend, temporal limitations. Similarly — but in far 
greater degree — the rapture of the saints, the ecstasy 
of redeemed and sanctified spirits, is exempt from 
the conditions of time. Heaven is not a place or a 
period, but a state ; it is spiritual existence in its 
pure and perfect form. As our Lord Himself said, 
" This is life eternal, that they might know Thee 

* Ps. exxxix. 8. 



Heaven. 343 

the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou 
hast sent." * 

Is it possible to understand that existence? 

It is necessary to look a little at the nature of man. 
For there is no doubt that the being which survives, 
and survives eternally, in Heaven is essentially the 
same being as existed upon earth. The continuity 
— the identity — remains. In what, then, does the 
identity consist ? According to the invariable teach- 
ing of the New Testament, it is the soul or yfrvxv of 
man which is immortal. But the soul is only a part 
of human nature, or, to speak exactly, it includes 
two parts of the composite human nature. For if 
human nature consists, as it does, of body, mind, and 
spirit (the mind including the affection as well as 
the intellect), then the soul is the sum of the mind 
and spirit, or, in other words, of the intellectual, 
moral, and spiritual faculties of man. 

The soul, then, is the seat of personality or identity ; 
and it is the soul which is immortal and enters 
Heaven. But if we know what it is that is immortal, 
we may hope to know what it is that the immortal 
being is capable of being or doing. The intellec- 
tual, moral, and spiritual faculties of man continue 
eternally. And Heaven is the perfected state or 
activity of these faculties. It is right to guard or 
limit the conception of Heaven, as has been seen, 
by negative principles. But no merely negative 
conception of Heaven can be just. To regard it 
simply as a state of immunity from sin and sorrow 

* John xvii. 3. 



344 The Faith of Centuries. 

and suffering is to mistake its character altogether. 
That in Heaven the wicked cease from troubling and 
the weary are at rest is true enough. But Heaven 
is none the less a state of constant activity. It is 
gravely misconceived, if it is represented as a cessation 
of work, a state of indolence or perpetual psalm- 
singing. The reward of fidelity in few things is 
not inactivity, but the opportunity of showing fidelity 
in many things. He who has ruled a few cities 
faithfully will become a ruler over many cities. The 
only legitimate Scriptural conception of Heaven is 
that in it the intellectual, moral, and spiritual faculties 
operate as on earth, only more vividly and intensely, 
and without such drawbacks as are incidental to the 
circumstances of human life. 

But the life of Heaven is clearly distinguished 
from the earthly life. Thus the human intellect is 
on earth subject to infirmity. It is often the victim 
of error or defeat or weariness. Man is impotent 
to learn the truth that he longs to know. He 
cannot hope to comprehend an Infinite Providence. 
The sense of impenetrable mystery hangs over him 
and gives him pain. Even his belief in God he 
holds with fear and trembling ; it is not an absolute 
certainty to him, but the best of probabilities. He 
knows only how little he knows or can ever know 
so long as he lives. He is like a child playing 
on the shore of the ocean of truth. And this 
limitation of human knowledge is consequent, as 
the facts clearly show, upon the material character 
of human life. But let the materialism be done 



Heaven. 345 

away, let the spirit of man be no more cloyed and 
darkened by flesh, and the full light from Heaven 
will flow in. It may be reasonably surmised that 
the soul in its celestial state will be permitted to 
realise the magnificence of the Divine providential 
purpose reaching from eternity to eternity, and to 
dwell upon it with rapturous devotion. There will 
be an end of doubt, of difficulty, of denial. The 
book sealed with seven seals will be unloosed. It 
shall be the " Lamb as it had been slain " who shall 
unloose it. Then shall the secret of God be known. 
Then shall His qualities of power and love be recog- 
nised and harmonised. The Incarnation will be clearly 
seen as the central fact of Providence. Faith will 
merge in sight. Hope will issue in adoration. In the 
stately language of the Apocalyptic vision the song 
shall be sung, * Thou art worthy to take the book, 
and to open the seals thereof: for Thou wast slain, 
and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood out 
of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and 
nation." * 

Again, as on earth the intellectual faculty of man 
is subject to error, so is his moral faculty to sin. 
This is too plain a fact to be gainsaid. Man is a 
creature of passions and emotions ; but there is no 
passion or emotion that is not potentially, and often 
practically, sinful. The lust of the flesh, as Holy 
Scripture calls it, in its varied manifestations tends 
towards sin. The more eager are human desires, 
the more they approximate to sin. Sin as a pall 

* Rev. v. 9. 



346 The Faith of Centuries. 

spreads over human life. It is thrown into greater 
relief by the virtuous affections which it so often 
resists and defeats. To desire goodness and to fail 
of it perpetually, to be what we would not be and 
to hate ourselves for being so, to be ever on the 
verge of a victory that is never won — such is the 
weary indefeasible lot of man. In what striking 
words does St. Paul describe it ! " The good that 
I would I do not : but the evil which I would not, 
that I do. ... I delight in the law of God after 
the inward man : but I see another law in my 
members, warring against the law of my mind, and 
bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which 
is in my members." * 

But let it be supposed that the passions and 
emotions are intensified and at the same time eman- 
cipated from the taint of sin, that love is perfectly 
pure and ambition selfless and duty a joy that never 
fails : is not this essentially the life of Heaven ? The 
nature of man, as has been said, is partly emotional. 
But his emotions are not understood in their dignity 
and beauty so long as they are compromised by 
temptation. It is at the gate of Heaven, where the 
emotions are at once quickened and sanctified, that 
it will be given to man to realise what his true 
nature is. 

But the same reasoning applies to the spiritual as 
to the intellectual or the moral faculty of man. It 
is the spiritual faculty whereby we know God. God 
is Spirit, and we approach Him spiritually or not at 

* Rom. vii. 19, 22, 23. 



Heaven. 347 

all. But on earth the spiritual vision is obscured 
by the flesh. It is only at rare moments that we 
rise, as it were, into the presence of God. St. Paul 
so rose when he "heard unspeakable words, which 
it is not lawful for a man to utter " ; but such rapture 
was even in his experience unique. For the most 
part we catch but faint and far-off glimpses of Divine 
things. Between God and man a veil still hangs. 
As we enter the heavenly city that veil will be rent 
in twain. We shall see Him face to face. The 
spiritual faculty of man will find its consummation 
in the unclouded vision, the incessant adoration, of 
the Almighty. 

Thus worship will be not the sole but the supreme 
activity of the redeemed in Paradise. It is worship 
which overshadows all other energies in the Divine 
Apocalypse. " They rest not day and night, saying, 
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, 
and is, and is to come." * For when knowledge is 
perfected and emotion purified, there is nothing that 
can hinder the soul from its absolute self-consecration 
at the feet of the Most High. 

It were easy, but needless, to amplify this theme. 
It is enough that Heaven should be felt to be the 
perfectness — the perfect state and perfect exercise — 
of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual faculties, which 
are embarrassed and darkened on earth by frailty 
and sin. 

May it be said here that theology, and Protestant 
theology more than any other, has tended to make 

* Rev. iv. 8. 



348 The Faith ot Centuries. 

too much of death? Death is not the end of life, 
but an event in life. The death of saints is an 
emancipation from limiting conditions. It is a 
progress, an exaltation. It is the entrance into a 
new sublime existence. Under whatever form and 
by whatever means, it is the sole avenue by which 
man passes, or can pass, into the immediate presence 
of the Creator. But as he was in the years of his 
mortal life, so he is, except for his deliverance from 
the flesh, after the event of death. 

Human life, then, is a discipline for Heaven. Man, 
if he shall inherit heaven, must be prepared for it ; 
and the preparation must begin on earth. 

This view of Heaven is, or ought to be, profoundly 
influential upon the conduct of life. For if the soul 
passes from the earthly life into the heavenly, taking 
with it the faculties possessed and developed on 
earth, then how vital, how paramount, is the duty of 
cultivating these faculties in the earthly life ! We 
shall not enter upon immortality as paupers or 
novices, but as invested with all the attainments and 
the virtues which we have acquired, however pain- 
fully, upon earth. There can be no sure justification 
for the belief that by any process of sudden con- 
version the lot of one who has taken no pains with 
himself in this life, who has formed no habit of 
industry, or humility, or devotion, or purity, will in 
the next life be immediately equalised with the lot 
of one who has spent his earthly life in prayer and 
penitence and patient well-doing, 

As ever in his great Taskmaster's eye. 



Heaven. 349 

The dignity of life rests upon the assurance that 
human actions are not limited in their effect to the 
mere threescore and ten years of mortality ; but that 
dignity becomes more solemn and profound, if it be 
realised that the formation of character upon earth 
is the seed-plot of an eternal destiny. There is no 
more moralising or inspiring sentiment than that 
every sin or shame of earth must meet its due penalty 
in the eternal world, and conversely that every duty 
done upon earth, every victory over self, every sacri- 
fice endured, every cup of cold water given for Christ's 
sake to His little ones, will not lose its recognition 
and its recompense when He shall have established 
the Kingdom. 

This paper has been occupied with the nature of 
the heavenly life ; it has not touched upon the law 
of salvation. Let it be said again, however, lest I 
chance to be misunderstood, that, though man may 
and must fit himself for Heaven by the discipline of 
his tastes, affections, dispositions, and activities, he 
cannot hope to merit Heaven by anything that he 
can do ; he must rest his hope upon the efficacy of 
that which has been done for him by One who is 
greater than himself, even upon the atoning sacrifice 
of the Saviour. 

But the considerations advanced in this paper 
suggest a solution of a problem that has occurred 
to many an anxious, yearning heart in the presence 
of death. It is asked if they who have known and 
loved upon earth will regain such mutual knowledge 
in eternity. 



35° The Faith of Centuries. 

Can it be doubted that this knowledge will be 
theirs ? 

Continuity, it has been said, is by death not 
broken ; identity remains ; personality survives the 
grave. As the poet of the In Memoriam says 
expressively — 

Eternal form shall still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside. 

And if it be so, then it may be permitted to hope 
— nay, indeed, to believe intensely — that in Heaven 
we shall enjoy the society of those who have been 
nearest to us and dearest upon earth. We shall 
know them, and they us. We shall live with them 
in full and free communion. We shall meditate with 
them upon the Divine Almighty goodness. We shall 
participate in their joy, their gratitude, their adoration. 
Only the saddest of all earthly fears — the fear of 
separation — will be wanting. The intimacy of souls 
will not be darkened by the overshadowing sense that 
it cannot endure for more than a brief space. There 
will be no more parting for ever. 

This, or something like this, the celestial state may 
be reverently conceived to be. This is the answer 
of the Church to the question, What is Heaven ? 

J. E. C. Welldon. 



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